How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business (7 Key Steps) Watch Overview

While not without its share of controversies, Twitter is one of the most powerful social media platforms available, and can help you to promote your business and reach a wider audience with your message.

And we’ll show you exactly how to do that, right here!

Estimates vary, but in terms of user numbers, it has somewhere between 300 and 400 million users who are active on the platform at least once a month.

And its owner, Elon Musk, recently stated it has around 259.4 million users on the platform daily.

That’s smaller of course than platforms like Facebook and Instagram… but its users tend to not just be more affluent and educated, but also more open to business-oriented messaging.

In addition, Twitter is particularly valuable if you’re targeting a US- or Japan-based demographic, with users from those countries making up a significant portion of its user base.

So let’s discuss some best practices for promoting your business on Twitter, including:

• Optimizing your profile…
• Adding value with (and optimizing) your content…
• How to measure your results…
• Using Twitter’s paid options.

Ready to dive in?

Let’s start with the foundation of your presence on Twitter…

7 Key Steps for Promoting Your Business on Twitter

1. Optimize Your Profile

Your profile on Twitter reflects how you appear on the platform, both via your tweets and when people view your account directly.

Ensuring this represents your brand in an optimal way is an important foundation for everything else you do on Twitter.

There are a few main components to your profile as follows…

Profile Picture

Starting with your profile picture, make sure the images on your profile are high quality and represent your brand well.

The profile picture is what appears in a circle on your profile page, and alongside each tweet.

Here’s an example from one of Elon Musk’s other businesses:

Note that your profile picture will appear in a circle, unless you have a business account and have signed up for Twitter Blue for Business.

The recommended dimensions for a profile picture on Twitter are 400x400 pixels, and you can upload images up to 2MB. JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs are all acceptable.

Header Image

The header image is what appears right at the top of your profile.

Use a picture that you believe best represents your business.

It can of course be adjusted at any time, and can help promote your business on Twitter in different ways. For example, it might be used to reflect current marketing initiatives, or to focus on particular projects your business is working on.

Remember this will show at different resolutions on different devices, and not everything in the image may be visible when viewing it on a particular device.

The recommended dimensions for a header image are 1500x500 pixels. If adding text to the image, don’t place it within 60 pixels of the top or bottom of the image or it could be cropped. The same rule applies for important graphical elements.

Bio

Write a bio that accurately describes your business, and what you stand for as a brand.

This can be up to 160 characters long, but that doesn’t mean you have to use them all up. Sometimes just a few words can sum it up nicely.

Think about the value your brand brings to the world, and the benefits people get from doing business with you.

Link

Include a link back to your website so that visitors interested in finding out more about you can do so.

This might be a link to your home page or to a suitable landing page.

The link will be displayed underneath the text for your bio.

Location

If you represent a business serving a particular geographic area, or otherwise want to make it clear where you’re based, then adding your location to your profile can be useful too.

2. Use Content to Build Relationships, Trust and Visibility

Of course, for all the time you might spend perfecting your profile, it’s worth little if no one actually sees it.

And that’s where posting content comes in.

Each time you tweet something out, more people will see your brand and potentially engage with your content, possibly even following you if it aligns with their interests.

Your organic usage of Twitter is important even if your primary intention is to use the platform as a paid channel (which we explore more in #7 below).

If you’re regularly showing ads but users see an empty-looking, inactive profile, it destroys trust and credibility and negatively impacts the effectiveness of those ads.

With your organic tweets, your primary aim should be to create content that’s interesting, engaging and informative for your audience.

Here’s a quick overview of how to make engaging social media posts, including for Twitter (click here for the full guide):

Create different types of tweets that keep your audience interested, including:

• Text-based tweets…
• Tweets using visual media such as images and videos…
• Links to content you may have published elsewhere (such as your blog and other content channels)...
• Links to relevant third-party content…
• Retweets from other relevant profiles.

However, try to keep your tweeting regular and consistent. This is what creates the most positive results, and helps keep audiences engaged.

The easiest way to do this is via a social media posting schedule that takes advantage of repurposing content you’ve already published on other channels to create a foundational flow of content published through your profile.

This is best done via an effective content repurposing workflow so it’s all systematized and ‘just happens’ rather than requiring constant management.

Then, layered on top of this type of content, you can layer in other types such as retweets from other relevant users, industry news and insights, marketing-related tweets (such as a current promotion) and so on.

3. Optimize Your Content

To ensure your tweets get the most reach and engagement, and help to promote your business to best effect, optimize your content accordingly, including use of the following…

Hashtags

Hashtags help to immediately indicate what your tweet is about, while attracting a wider audience who are following particular topics.

Here’s a guide to how hashtags work on Twitter.

Social Meta Tags

When tweeting a link to content on your blog for example, you can tell Twitter to automatically pull in appropriate media to help your tweet stand out visually in the feed.

This is done by adding some special code to your site called social meta tags. For Twitter specifically, this is done by using what are called Twitter cards.

Here’s an example of an EverywhereMarketer tweet, where Twitter cards are used behind the scenes to tell Twitter what image (and image size) to use:

[An example of a tweet that uses Twitter cards—use the same to help promote your business twitter-cards-promote-business.jpg]

The code to do this looks a bit like the following:

Want to know how this works? See this post for full information on how to use and apply Twitter cards, including the exact code you need.

4. Engage With Your Audience

As well as posting content, engaging with your followers is a crucial part of promoting your business on Twitter.

Ways you can do this include:

• Responding to messages and tweets from followers…
• Retweeting tweets from other users
• Liking tweets…
• Getting involved in Twitter chats…
• Using tweets to ask questions and start conversations.

Keep a regular eye on your Twitter account so that tweets can be responded to promptly, thereby building relationships while increasing confidence and trust in the ability of your brand to deliver value and look after customers.

5. Monitor Your Brand

Are you watching out for when your brand is mentioned and what people are saying about you?

This is an important part of promoting your business, and delivers some important key benefits:

• You gain important insights into how your products and services are perceived…
• You’re able to respond to any negative feedback or comments promptly…
• You have the opportunity to reward those spreading the word about your business in a positive way.

So how do you actually do this in practice?

One way is to set up alerts for your brand name and related keywords using tools like Hootsuite’s Brandwatch and Mentionlytics (while also monitoring other social media platforms in a similar way).

Most such tools allow you for example to create custom streams that show all the tweets (and other social posts) that mention the keywords you want to be monitored such as your brand name.

6. Measure Results

Of course, you need to be able to measure how your activities on Twitter are performing, so you know how your efforts are paying off, as well as be able to test different approaches and judge their effectiveness.

Metrics you can measure include:

• Your follower count…
• Your engagement rates such as the number of comments, likes and retweets…
• Impressions and reach.

One way to measure these is to use Twitter Analytics, accessible via the More menu.

There are also multiple third-party analytics tools available that can add important additional insights, such as Sprout Social and Iconosquare.

To get the best results, set some goals for your Twitter strategy and then track your progress towards them. This helps you focus on activities that will help move the business forward, while increasing motivation to do so as you start to see progress..

7. Venture Into Paid

Finally, you can’t talk about using Twitter to promote your business without mentioning the platform’s paid advertising options, such as promoted tweets and follower ads.

For example, promoted tweets mean you can reach a much wider audience, while targeting exactly who you want to see your tweets.

The good news is that we have a full guide on how to use Twitter ads that details the 5 simple steps to follow to get started, as well as more advanced tips on how to advertise successfully on the platform.

Watch the following quick overview, and then access the full guide here.

To Conclude

Learning how to use Twitter to promote your business effectively allows you to start using the platform to reach new audiences and build your brand.

This post has shown you exactly how to do just that, with 7 steps you need to follow including optimizing your profile, using (and optimizing) content in effective ways, keeping an eye on your metrics, and using Twitter’s paid advertising options.