Brands are realising the importance of a solid digital marketing strategy. It’s clear that your efforts on social media will be central to that.  Therefore, this article takes a look at some of the best practices on Twitter for the best results.

1. Your image and bio is crucial 

When you are new to Twitter, it’s tempting to want to get stuck in immediately with your first tweet. However, for the best results in life, it’s necessary to put in the best planning. Therefore, choose your name, open your account and verify it, but get the basics right before you send out your first tweet.

You will have to be a bit careful here because Twitter will encourage you to tweet. However, remember tweets with no profile image don’t look good, and users will check your profile if they like your content. All this means you need to choose your images carefully and be sure to have written a brief bio describing your business. It’s also a good idea to have included a link to your website so that you can see referral traffic from day one.

2. Have a plan for tweets 

The next stage to the planning process is about the tweeting activity itself. So, you have uploaded your images and happy with the bio description you have written. However, you will only do Twitter justice if you have a plan for content.

It’s up to you what this plan looks like, but you should know how often you will tweet and a vague idea of the subjects and type of content you will post. One cautionary note here though is these things should be subject to change. Even when following the best practices, every business is different, and your schedule should be open to constant modification.

3. Stay active to be relevant 

One of the biggest things to understand about Twitter is it moves incredibly fast. So much so that it is nearly impossible to tweet too much to turn people off your feed. The flip side of this is not being active enough can be a significant problem is you want to stay relevant.

As mentioned, a reliable schedule is the best way to avoid this pitiful. Always be aware though of what being active means, you can find this out through a combination of best practices and trial and error as you activate your strategy. As a general rule though, one tweet a day is unlikely to be enough to generate the results you are looking for, so for most brands best practice will be several updates per day.

4. Schedule your updates 

Once you understand what you want to tweet about and the importance of staying active, it’s also crucial to action your activity on Twitter. Even when you have a clearly defined schedule, it’s easy to be distracted and not action each item according to your plan.

A small business without social media staff could get into this problem, as well as entrepreneurs running every aspect of their business themselves. The critical thing to do to avoid this problem is to use a scheduling application such as Buffer or Hootsuite. You will then be able to plan all your tweets a week or even a month in advantage, so when life or other business interests get in the way, your social media activity will not suffer.

5. Don’t expect others to do all the following 

There are many schools of thought on how brands should approach following on Twitter. It’s also fair to say; there are many factors to consider here such as the size of your brand and how often you will tweet. However, assuming you are a smaller brand that won’t get millions of fans with no effort, sitting back and waiting for followers isn’t the best strategy.

Of course, there are many strategies you can use to gain followers, such as regular tweeting, engaging in conversations and promoting your account on your website. Remember though that following users relevant to you is also something you want to do. It’s good practice and something Twitter activity engages and the practice can help you gain new followers. The bottom line is don’t be passive and always look to engage with new users.

It’s crucial that brands get their digital marketing strategy right, and this is the way most customers are reached. Social media is one of the most critical elements of that overall strategy and this article has focused on the Twitter side of it. Remember that your profile image and bio is crucial, have a plan for tweets, stay active to be relevant, schedule your updates and don’t expect others to do all the following.