As you may have seen, Twitter has taken the world by storm today. Elon Musk has officially made his purchase for $44 billion dollars. The reason that this is a big deal is because Twitter used to shadow ban people and it was no different for businesses.
Basically what was happening is the algorithm was not performing optimally, and Elon is basically taking the current algorithm, putting it into open source code and allowing the entire world to see it and then make alterations and edits to it. Elon has also had a gain of over a million followers every day for the last three days now on the platform, getting him up to a whopping 85 million followers.
This change should honestly bring a lot of people back to the platform, myself included. I left because Twitter was cluttered with the narrative of what the staff of Twitter wanted to show the world.
Even talking about this, that is bringing the businesses back as well because the market is growing again there. So, we're going to go over some of the stats on why I think that you should join Twitter again for your business.
Twitter right now is the world's seventh favorite social media platform. If I had to guess it's going to climb a rank or two after all of the change takes place. It is currently ranking above Facebook Messenger. Messenger is currently bigger than Snapchat. A lot of people don't know that the user count is estimated to grow upwards of 329 million people on Twitter in 2022. Twitter is still about a seventh of Facebook’s size and one quarter of United States adults use the platform. 21% use TikTok which is very interesting that Twitter is currently bigger in terms of users than TikTok in the United States. 40% of adults also say that they use Instagram less than Twitter or TikTok as well. That doesn't necessarily mean they're using Instagram more than Twitter, but I think it gives Twitter a little bit of pull in the fight here for attention.
Businesses want people to spend time with the brand so that they purchase with you more often. If you have a very high number of organic engagement, then I would recommend Twitter to you because for example, YouTube the brand itself is the largest account on Twitter, and it has been a powerful brand for pushing its narrative.
If you're using a posting software, and you schedule everything out, it may not be a big deal to you to add one more platform and tick that every time you go to post, but if it means setting daily reminders and it ends up becoming like a huge hassle for the payoff that your business may get then it's maybe not the best fit for you. If you have an agency that's posting for you like mine does for my clients, it is something that is low operational drag to add.
I'm going to give you some tips on the way that we can tweet! If it's been a couple years for you, like it has been for me, these might help you out. There's also a couple of things that have changed as well. The recommendation is that we always limit one to two hashtags per Tweet. A reason for that is just the clutter that it can produce inside the look of the tweet itself.
We should only really be hash-tagging things that are currently trending or specific to your business. Be conversational. Tweet things that people can actually respond to or could say themselves by a retweet and to keep the copy short and sweet.
As you know, you can go up to 280 characters, that is really good for marketing. Aim to keep all of your tweets to stay focused to one specific message, rather than trying to communicate multiple ideas. Now, if you do have more to say inside of one tweet, link out to your website or start a Tweet thread. You can reply to yourself and keep those Tweets going. It's broken up into individual pieces that way. If you can use images, gifs, or videos whenever possible, I would recommend. Video still does about six times better on average than photos do and photos do about twenty times better than text on average. We've got a big jump there when you can get a short and sweet video that has one point to it that does really well and the other thing with those inside of the videos and just tweets and in themselves make very clear calls to action. So, every time you tweet, ask yourself, “What do I want people to do when they see this?” then write it out and tell your audience to comment below or to follow you or if there's something urgent you need to emphasize, don't be shy. Always make sure that the next step that you want them to take is very important. Add visuals especially with video. Curate and connect with retweets and replies with bold images, gifs, videos, any sort of touch, a personality that you can use to increase your results.
Twitter's internal data revealed that there's over two billion video views per day on the platform right now. So for effective and memorable videos, you've got to remember to keep your company's logo on there. Keep it short with app subtitles. The current Tweet spot for Twitter's length right now is similar to TikTok’s original beginning length, six to fifteen seconds. Another thing for your business is to retweet relevant content. If people are following your page and you're re-tweeting things that they care about, then that's going to be good because you're providing value to them, even through someone else's posts.
Think of how often on Facebook you share someone else's public post to your Facebook page? It doesn't happen often, not your personal business. It doesn't happen often. Normally its all content that you are creating. Remember that you can rely on those retweets for getting more content out there.
Things that you could share would be positive customer feedback that you've had for your business articles or helpful ideas or topics that line up with your business's authentic voice and make sure that you are responsive to your direct messages as you are on all your platforms.
Before I made a tweet today, I went straight over to the trending page and looked at all of the hashtags that are currently trending. I tried to see if any of them applied to what I wanted to talk about. That's a really important thing to do.
A lot of you may be more familiar with that, but the Trending Page will grab a hashtag and essentially keep all the posts with that hashtag a certain period of time. So using those is good because it gets you extra exposure. Focus on keywords that are also relevant to your business.
The daily trends on your Explorer tab are going to be the best way that you can quickly identify the popular topics that you can try to tie your brand to. When you do it, try to do it in an authentic way.
If you're a car salesman, make it relevant to the actual tweet itself or just don't choose the hashtag. Tweet any of your new product launches, specials or promotions. Twitter is the best platform for brands to kind of launch new things because it has a quick and informational aspect to it. If you're doing a seasonal promotion or sale Twitter is a great way to do little sneak peaks for all the people that actually do follow you on Twitter. You've got to kind of give them a little bit more value than you would on the other platforms. Look at the popular times of day to actually tweet. All of this is going to be good, but you have to actually have a method to the madness.
You can't just be testing things and not having a control variable or testing things and not recording anything that's happening. The likelihood of you remembering your analytics and insights for Twitter specifically over one month to the next while you're also dealing with everything else inside of your business is probably low. Keep testing everything out, be bold for your audience, and try to give them a lot of value. Twitter really provides the opportunity for brands to do things that are very out of character from what they usually do on their other platforms.
Try to remember to call to action. What do you want people to do when they see your tweet? Do you want them to laugh and get comedic value out of it? Do you have a message that you're trying to share? Write that out before you get your tweet down or say it in your head. That's how you want to think about it because that person is your perfect customer. The more people that you can get as keyboard warriors for you and your brand, and the more people that you have supporting you on the platform, the better that your business is inevitably going to do on the performance when it comes to the sales side of things.
So if we can be, as businesses, part of the Twitter community and leverage it to our benefit on top of providing value to our customers, take advantage of that. I'm going to be giving this a shot for my personal page and my business page over the next few months, it's probably going to take us a little bit of time to curate the things that we want to say.
We're going to be testing our brand's voice and how we do our calls to action, and the actual content that we're putting to the page. I want to be funny with it because all the rest of our social media is pretty serious.
