Did you know there are over 330 million active daily users on Twitter? If you’re looking to increase your customer base, interact with your audience more and improve your sales, Twitter is a great platform to use.

At this year’s Social Media Marketing World, top media experts discussed everything Twitter including tools to use, algorithm, analytics and how to turn conversations into customers.

Below are some key takeaways to connect with more of your customer base and increase sales.

The Value of a Tweet
Small businesses have started turning to Twitter to target their audience and increase their customer base. With that, it’s important to take into consideration the value of a tweet and how it can benefit your business.  

International Social Media Trainer Nicky Kriel stressed the value of a tweet is NOT the number of impressions, reach, engagement or if the post goes viral. The value is: The tweet drives traffic to your website, makes the right customers aware of the business, builds business relationships and generates revenue for your business.

To increase the value of your tweet, take a look at Twitter Analytics. This gives you the chance to dive deep into the data of the account and learn what works best.  Here you can be aware of who your audience is, their locations and their interests.

Produce great content with Twitter’s timeline algorithm
Creative Content Marketers duo Andrew and Pete shared their strategy for working with the Twitter algorithm with the acronym TUCEPM!

The Twitter algorithm ensures the most important tweets appear at the top of users’ timelines. Per Twitter, tweets that followers are more likely to care about will show up first based on accounts and tweets with which they interact.

Keeping the algorithm in mind, there are ways to achieve organic reach. Check out a few below:

  • Timeliness: Newer posts get shown more often than older ones, so it’s important to post in real-time and relevant times to your audience. Take advantage of relevant trending topics and post a few minutes before or after the hour as opposed to at the top of the hour.
  • User interests: Use Twitter analytics to find out what your audience cares about the most.
  • Credibility signals: Twitter’s algorithm favors accounts that are credible, meaning the profile is complete with a name, bio, location, website, profile picture and header image. Tweets shouldn’t have broken links, swearing, nudity, high bounce rates or aren’t mobile responsive.
  • Engagement: The more engaging a tweet is, the greater its relevance score, which means it will show up across more timelines as a top tweet. Twitter takes into account the amount of time spent reading a tweet, sharing via direct messaging or if someone clicked the profile as a result of the tweet.
  • Tweets that have high engagement often include one of the following: “RT if,” “Retweet if,” “RT and follow to enter,” a Twitter poll, asks questions, mention/tag someone or uses GIFs.
  • Past engagement: People see more tweets from accounts they have engaged with in the past so increase engagement now to benefit in the future.
  • Media: Users are shown more of the media type they prefer based on what they have engaged with in the past. Along with your standard tweets, add in a variety of videos, images, GIFs and polls to keep followers engaged

As Andrew and Pete said using this acronym can help your account get the organic reach it deserves even with the new algorithm.

Improve your Twitter account with these tools
Throughout their workshops, four Twitter experts shared various tools that can help step up your Twitter game, work well with the Twitter algorithm and improve your content marketing. Below is a list of tools you can use can help grow your Twitter account.

Twitter Analytics
Measure and boost your impact by analyzing your followers’ interests, locations and demographics. Twitter analytics provide a 28 day summary or a summary by month to see what is working best for your account.

ManageFlitter
This tool allows you to manage multiple accounts, grow your business by finding relevant people to connect with and schedule tweets at optimal times.

Zest
A Google Chrome Extension that provides you with smart marketing content that is hand curated. This extension is similar to Sprout Social’s “Find Content” feature.

Union Metrics
Union Metrics provides social media analytics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Social Jukebox
Allows users to automated and schedule content on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Tweriod
Tweriod provides you with the best times to tweet by analyze your tweets and your followers’ tweets.

ClickToTweet
This tool encourages people to Tweet something by giving them a link. People who use this tool can promote, share and track content on Twitter.