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If you haven’t been directing your efforts towards building a strong presence on twitter you may want to reconsider. Although twitter is not as big as facebook in terms of traffic, it has many advantages that complete many missing features on facebook, such as being able to engage with people who haven’t just yet become your friends.

Rule number one on twitter is avoiding spamming. Twitter is a wonderful place to share your opinions and prospective, however many users (especially commercial bodies) abuse the twitterverse and the result is a huge noise of spammers. Don’t fool yourself, you may be sending out hundreds of tweets per day, but if you’re spamming then most likely your audience will be drifting away faster than you can say “follow me!”.  The key on twitter is not how much followers you have or how much tweets you’re sending each hour  – it’s about Value. Are you giving your audience what they want? Are you making real connections? Is your band benefiting your social marketing efforts? These are all questions that need to be seriously considered and addresses when building a twitter marketing strategy.

Lay off automation tools. Sure, scheduling tweets and bulk replying certainly makes life easier, especially when you’re dealing with large audiences. The problem with automation is that it achieves negative results in the long run (some would say it’s bad for your brand even in the short term). Automation gives the impression of impersonal touch. The whole notion behind social media marketing is being there for your customers, listening to them in real –time and acknowledging their role in influencing your product, service and even your message.  There are many tools out there that can make your life as a community manager easier, some involve automation techniques but this does not mean you’re hands free of using them in a careful and constructive way. Automated RSS feeds to your twitter accounts for example, are a great way of spreading new content to your audience and increasing your blog traffic. But, if you feed your accounts with automated content every hour you’re missing the point, and most crucially you’re damaging your audience trust (and that as we all know is very hard to restore once damaged). You’re tweets are bound to be ignored and your followers will probably unfollow you (that’s what happens when you’re spamming).

Always be on the spy. Whether you’re new to twitter or an experienced user, you ALWAYS have to be on the watch for competition. Twitter is growing in an overwhelming pace and welcomes in newcomers, with a blink of the eye you can wake up one morning just to discover your competitors are doing a much better job in engaging with your audience.  Instead of being intimidated by their marketing efforts, find those who “do it best” and follow their examples and start engaging with their followers. Make sure you also carefully examine their mistakes – you can learn about what works and what doesn’t from competitors’ unsuccessful strategies. Remember – Twitter data is public, you can easily use that data to learn so much about your competitor’s followers and strategies.

Go back to profile. Editing your profile is a tip that many companies tend to neglect. This is too bad since in some cases changing your profile may make a substantial difference if you’re not doing as well as you initially expected. Some things you may want to pay attention to is your custom background design – the first thing that users see when visiting your profile. Make sure that the design reflects your brand the best possible way. Another issue that tends to be overlooked is the bio’s info – you get a generous 160 characters for descriptive bio so make sure you choose your words carefully, be convincing!  Also, don’t neglect your profile picture – no one likes to follow generic twitter icons or a logo. Remember people expect to see a real person behind the profile; twitter is all about engagement with people not companies and/or brands

Targeting your audience

Sharing your interests and political views on twittersphere is awesome and may contribute to your personal growth and development. However, if you expect to see any increase of ROI or marketing results you really should put some effort in targeting your audience the best possible way. Don’t get tempted by an ego-inflating amount of followers. It is much wiser to have fewer targeted followers than thousands of followers who have nothing to do with your brand. Some twitter users think that following a bunch of users will increase their engagement results (the fact is that about 70% of the people you follow will follow you back), but the reality is that by having non-strategic followers you’re just increasing noise within your own community. Targeting your audience can be done by geo-location (local business for example) or by using keyword filters – learn more about targeting your audience on itweetlive. You can also get followers from your own online properties – your blogs, website, and email newsletters – whatever works. The bottom line is making sure you’re effectively engaging with a targeted well-segmented audience.

Listening on Twitter through Searches and finding the right replies

Remember twitter is a social network. You can post endless tweets, links and RSS feeds but if you fail to engage then your efforts will go down the drain. Your twitter presence is not about you, it’s about the community.

One of the best Twitter management tools that I highly recommend for setting up your listening and engagement strategies on Twitter is itweetlive. This tool allows you to setup multiple searches and group your audience to get optimal engagement results.  itweetlive helps you monitor your mentions, direct messages, searches and most importantly provides a statistical outlook regarding the success rate of your replies. This is how it works:

First you target your audience by using a built-in keyword filter. Let’s say you’re looking to engage with anyone you tweeted “I wish I was happy”  

Itweetlive will find you all the people who have “I wish I was happy” in their tweets. The next stage will be creating a response list for that search. For example, you can ask these people “why are you feeling unhappy” or simply tweet encouraging replies (maybe even including a link to a video or post that will put a smile on their faces).  Try asking questions, sharing your thoughts, write down quotes. Well, you get the point.

After creating your response list click “Save & next” which will direct you to your inbox page were you can choose to queue, edit or delete your replies. Notice you can either bulk reply or individually edit them if you feel they don’t fit certain tweet in your search results. Other cool features for individual tweets are the built-in retweet and follow buttons.  

Go back to your replies and check how effective your engagement was. Itweetlive provides tracking tools that are helpful in figuring out what replies work best and whether or not your twitter marketing strategy is effective. You can check your mentions, replies, click-thrus and other statistical data that will help you build a winning strategy.

I hope this post gave you a basic outlook on using twitter whether you’re a twitter newbie or a community manager (we all tend to forget things as we develop skills especially when dealing with an expanded field as twitter). Keep in mind that building a solid engagement takes time and practice, so don’t give up and try different marketing tools, eventually you’ll get there.