We’ve covered some helpful Twitter marketing tips in our previous two posts, but now it’s time to wrap up our Twitter Talk series with a few last good-to-know pieces of advice.

7. Interact with Followers/Other Brands. A great way to drive interaction with your followers is to conduct polls. Not only will a poll spur users to connect with your company on some level, it’s also a great way to get some real feedback and research done without a lot of effort on your part. Beyond polls, if your company is tagged in a tweet or a company-related hashtag is used, respond! You want your Twitter account to be known to really engage with followers and in general, be active. You can also interact with other brands as well, whether your company officially works with them, is co-owned by them, or simply uses them — or not. Remember to keep your posts positive — and if a user writes something negative, you’ll still want to publicly and appropriately respond, but consider moving the conversation into your DMs.

8. Utilize Influencers. Using Influencers can be a great way to increase brand awareness and shine a spotlight on your company. It’s easier than ever before to approach an Influencer and pitch them. The first step is identifying an Influencer that is appropriate for your business and making sure their goals align with yours. Next, you’ll want to contact them to gauge their interest in a possible partnership. Make sure to do your research in order to pick an Influencer that truly has an impressive influence on the demographic you’re hoping to reach and that they are someone your company wants to be in association with.

9. Practice Social Media Cohesion. Your Twitter account is not an island and its strategy shouldn’t be approached as such. Your company should have and be active on multiple other social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you want to remember to work towards a cohesive feel to your social media profiles for optimal branding and messaging purposes. Colors, language, activity, etc., should all be similar so your followers and consumers get the best sense possible of your business and can expect the same quality across the social media board.

And thus concludes our Twitter Talk series! Hopefully, once implemented, these nine tips will help you better your Twitter marketing practices and further your company’s brand! Happy tweeting!

Image via Pixabay

It’s time to dive back into Twitter Talk! Now that we’ve got some of the initial Twitter marketing tips covered, let’s go a little deeper into useful methods and advice to keep in mind when posting on the social media site.

4. Use Images or Video. Posts with images or video are way more engaging and likely to be looked at than posts that are just text. Images are better than plain words, but videos are even better than images. Both images and videos should be good quality and pertinent to your post. Beyond just regular videos, you can also try out the Live Video feature, which will allow your video to be watched even after the live feed ends. Try to find a happy balance of both in order to increase your shares and clicks.

5. Timing is Everything. Posting on Twitter is a waste if you’re not doing it at the right times of day. You want to drive engagement and increase visibility by being active on Twitter when other users are also active. The weekends are typically a time when lots of users are on the site for a longer period of time, which means posting then is good practice. Posting in the afternoons throughout the week is also usually a popular time to engage users. Identifying what days and times do best for your company may take a bit of testing and practice, but you’ll want to figure that out so you can make Twitter really work for you. And using tools like Buffer or Hootsuite will allow your business to schedule content in advance which is convenient — and even more so if your “peak” window is at a time outside of business hours.

6. Don’t Go #HashtagCrazy. Using more than two hashtags per tweet may cause your engagement to drop — so don’t go hashtag-crazy! With the being said, you also want to make sure you’re using the right hashtags, and you can see which of your hashtags performed well by using Twitter analytics to inform future hashtag decisions. Another good way to pick a hashtag is to see what’s trending on the side of Twitter and choose a tag that’s relevant to your company to use while tweeting.

Check back next month for our final post in the Twitter marketing series where we’ll give you a few more tips on how to best use Twitter in your marketing efforts!

Image via Pixabay

Twitter has become increasingly popular over the last several years and is an integral social media tool to be using when marketing. It’s a great way to reach millennials and if you use Twitter correctly, you may even keep that fickle demographic as loyal consumers. Let’s dive into some Twitter talk where we’ll cover some Twitter marketing tips in this three-part series.

1. Choosing a good username and photos. Whatever Twitter handle you pick has to be short, catchy, and easily recognizable. You want users who search for your company to quickly find your page. If your brand’s name is long or has some sort of special character in it that you can’t use in your handle, opt for the next closest thing or an abbreviated version of your business’s name and be consistent in using the same handle across all social media channels. Your profile photo should be your company’s logo unless it’s not simple and legible on all screens. Your header photo is also a good place to put your logo or otherwise showcase your brand.

2. Write a great bio. Your Twitter bio is limited to 160 characters which means you need to pack a punch in a small word count. Your bio should accurately reflect who your company is or what they do while also being unique so you’ll want to be precise, show some personality, and make sure your overall bio fits with your brand’s messaging and audience. Additionally, your bio is a great place to include relevant hashtags or other tags that users should use or that your company will use when posting.

3. Be Creative. Whether it’s inviting users to check out your website or announcing a new product, replying to a follower who tagged you or something else altogether, you don’t want your Twitter account to be boring. Creativity is key. Be funny, be original, and be interesting. It’ll attract more followers and do wonders for your brand recognition and sales. That being said, you may want to create branding guidelines as far as language your company uses and doesn’t use and how it responds to certain types of posts. While you don’t want your content or replies to be uniform, a general sense of consistency is a good idea.

Stay tuned for next month’s blog post where we’ll continue our Twitter marketing series with Part 2! And in the meantime, take a look at your company’s Twitter account and make sure you’re implementing the above tips.

Image via Pexels

Ever since Oreo’s epic real time marketing win during the 2013 Super Bowl, PR and marketing professionals have been ga-ga for real time marketing. That said, there have been plenty of really terrible attempts since, so I think it’s worth exploring the best practices for real time marketing to college students. First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page here:

What is Real Time Marketing?

The internet has allowed us to communicate more quickly to more people more cheaply than any other medium before, and for marketing professionals, that’s really exciting. In an ideal scenario, real time marketing means offering unique and engaging content to interested consumers at the perfect moment in time. For example, Oreo tweeted this the moment the lights went out during the 2013 Super Bowl:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

It’s perfect. People were already madly tweeting about the game and then the outage, so the tweet went massively viral and had all the marketing bloggers talking about it for the next week.

And Then There’s the Bad…

Unfortunately, real time marketing is rarely done in such a seamless way. For example, American Apparel sent an email blast to its subscribers during Hurricane Sandy to advertise a “Hurricane Sandy Sale.” People were understandably outraged:

I just received a “Hurricane Sandy sale” email blast from @AmericanApparel. I will forever boycott their stores. RT if you’re with me

— Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) October 30, 2012

Let’s be honest here, everybody loves a sale, but when your marketing attempt seems to make light of a serious tragedy that killed 125 people and buried a metro area under water, there’s going to be some negative feedback. I think American Apparel could have approached this event more successfully though. For example, maybe instead of giving patrons 20% off, they donate 20% of their sales to victims of the storm? That’s the kind of real time marketing that wins you fans.

The Best Time for Real Time

College students have the opportunity to attend hundreds of events on or around their campus every year. Between basketball games, football games, concerts, parties, guest speakers, conferences, and television shows there is no shortage of opportunity for real time marketing attempts. That said, not every event is the best place for real time marketing, and it doesn’t always pay to be the first person to open his/her mouth:

“Good timing is equally critical in the world of real-time marketing. But having good timing is not the same as doing things quickly. Where speed is fast and arbitrary, timing is about being patient and discriminating. It can mean acting quickly, but only if you’re thoughtful enough to wait until you identify the right moment—so you’re reacting because it makes sense, not just because you can. Social savvy, whether at a cocktail party or on Twitter, requires a basic understanding of intrinsic social graces, including attentiveness and restraint. When brands rush breathlessly…they often run into trouble.” – Cheryl Metzger

So What are the Best Events to Reach Students?

If you’re not in college any more, you may not keep up with the trends. If you don’t, I’d recommend following some college blogs or accounts on Twitter. Still, there are some events that are pretty much guaranteed to hold students’ attention:

• Sporting events (especially football and basketball)
• Awards shows
• Concerts
• TV shows

Once you figure out which ones your customers are watching, it’s pretty easy to get in on the real time marketing train on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr.

As Always, Content is Key

By now, you should be putting together a list of a few events that you’d like to try doing some real time marketing during. Good. Now the big question is, “what do you say?”

No matter when or how you do your marketing, high-quality content is the key to a successful campaign. Whether it’s infographics, videos, blog posts, Tweets, or Pins, if it’s not very good, your audience isn’t going to be impressed. This doesn’t mean you have to be an expert at video production or a master of photoshop, but if you’re not, don’t try to use them.

College students – more than other demographics – can smell through your crappy content. No matter how timely your marketing is, any real time efforts will fall short if they’re not well executed.

Has your company or employer started using real time marketing? What tips do you have for using it? Let me hear your thoughts in the comments below.