How To Use Twitter As A Marketing Tool Part 3: Monitor and Maintain

In Part 1 of this article about Using Twitter as a marketing tool, I talked about how you can include links in your tweets to attract the right audience and drive traffic to your website. In Part 2, I emphasised the importance of connecting with your customers: of maintaining an active, polite and interesting online personality. In Part 3, I’m going to describe the methods you can use to judge how successful your Twitter marketing is.

Trial and Error

You’re not going to get your Twitter profile right the first time you set it up. In fact, it will take quite a lot of trial and error, complications and mistakes, before you start getting the right followers, mentions and connections.

Building up a successful Twitter profile is generally a slow, gradual process. You will gain followers by following yourself, by engaging with people online, customers will find you and follow you and other Twitter users will do the same. You need to experiment with different techniques and strategies in order to build up the right connections.

There are occasions, however, when users can boost their following massively with a stunt or popular tweet. Companies have gained huge followings thanks to a sarky tweet or clever comment posted online. Unless your company benefits from a jocular-toned Twitter account, I would advise against this: you’re more likely to alienate your customers or just be ignored.

Instead, one of the best ways to increase your following quickly is to give customers an incentive. Create a competition where people have to follow you on Twitter in order to be in with a chance of winning a prize.

Even if your Twitter account is doing really well, there is no guarantee that people will be clicking through to your site. Getting your Twitter profile right will take time and money, so you need to make sure that the effort you put in is getting a substantial enough return on investment.

The Right Audience

In Part 2, I talked about the importance of finding the right customers. First, you need to find the right audience. It will take you time to find the right audience. The right audience isn’t necessarily comprised of the people who engage with you online – if people connect with you on Twitter all you know is that they are active on the site. Even if they seem interested in your industry and products, they won’t necessarily click through your links in order to buy your goods.

Of course, you still need to maintain an active and personable Twitter profile. People will see your activity on the site and become interested in your company; bad customer service, on the other hand, will put them off. Also, current customers are more likely to stay loyal to your company if you engage with them on the service.

The right audience isn’t necessarily even the people who click through your links. There is no point in driving traffic to your site if they don’t make any purchases. This is why is it imperative that you advertise your links in an honest, accurate way, otherwise the wrong people will click through, or even worse no one will.

It is vital that you monitor not only the figures on your Twitter account – Retweets, followers, mentions, etc. – but also click-through rates and purchase figures. Set up your links and pages so that you can work out exactly how many people are clicking on links on Twitter and then purchasing your products.

Monitor and Maintain

So, your Twitter profile is popular and active, you links are being clicked on and your products are being purchased… Don’t get complacent!

The Twittersphere is a relentless, ever-changing online universe. If you don’t monitor, maintain and continue to adapt your online presence, you’ll lose out.

To make your life a little easier, use a social media management tool like Ezeesocial to manage your profile. Ezeesocial even lets you manage multiple profiles, so you can organise and schedule tweets on your main profile and a customer service profile.

Twitter is updating its service all the time, while its users are finding new ways to profit from the site. You need to actively monitor the success of your account, while also researching and testing new marketing techniques, in order to profit from your Twitter profile.

For Part 1 of this article click here. For Part 2 of this article click here.

How do you stay active on Twitter?

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Will Sigsworth

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