How to Create Great Tweets That Get You More Business!
67% of Twitter followers want to buy from the brands they follow, but companies are not converting because:
- 56% of businesses do not have a plan to promote content: so that only
- 34% of companies actually get those leads from Twitter
With 271 million monthly active users and 277,000 tweets sent per minute, you need to produce engaging, memorable content. So where do you start as a busy fitness or wellness professional?
You don’t need to spend dozens of hours scouring the internet to confirm the most effective Twitter marketing tips and strategies; not only have we done that for you, but we’ve actually explored and tested these Twitter best practices, and they work!
This checklist provides you with a fast, simple and powerful list of things you can do right now to increase retweets (RTs), gain more Twitter followers and get sales.
Make a Plan
As we talked about earlier, the majority of businesses have no content marketing plan. Putting something on Twitter and hoping people retweet it and become followers is not a strategy. You need to start with the basics that so many others lack. Here’s how:
- Start by Reading my highly popular: 26 Powerful Twitter Marketing Tips for Fitness and Coaching Professionals – then:
- Get People to Share- You craft a great tweet. Now you need to get it noticed by people. Ask:
Customers– Ask every customer to follow you on Twitter. Mention the great content in your tweets. Let them know you really want them to retweet your content.
Business partners– Reach out to people in related businesses. If you are a fitness professional, ask health and wellness businesses to socially promote your brand.
Remember- always reciprocate on social media. Preemptive reciprocation and engagement can be even more powerful than waiting for others to share first, especially on Twitter!
For example, RT content or craft an engaging tweet that’s visually and keyword optimized for your target brand ambassador’s most important business message. Doing a quick but effective bit of preemptive research and Twitter-marketing for the people and brands you most want to connect with can really pay off!
Vendors– If you buy products or services from a company, ask them to help you out with your digital marketing and branding strategy. Ask them how you can help them meet their online branding and social selling goals as well. Let them know you’d love to share their best Tweets.
Industry Organizations– If you belong to a professional association, request they assist with your content marketing. For larger organizations, try connecting with their social media person. They might already have programs in place to help you.
Bonus Tip: Since Google started making its sweeping algorithm changes a few years ago, it’s a much bigger challenge to get quality links to your blog or website. High quality guest blogging is still a powerful organic link building strategy. So is putting a link in a related blog post for one and other.
Remember that a direct call to Retweet results in a 12 times higher retweet rate! That’s:
- 23x higher- when you spell out “retweet”
- 10x higher- when you use the abbreviation “RT”
- “Please RT” is a great way to start your most engaging and inspiring Tweets and RTs
Making an Eye-Catching Tweet
People remember visual information at an astonishingly higher rate than text only information. They also process visual content almost instantly and remember it much more easily and naturally. You need to take advantage of this on Twitter.
- Include Visuals– Visuals improve the effectiveness of your tweets, and Twitter offers detailed instructions on how to post images and photos from your computer or phone.
Images increase:
- Retweets 150%
- Clicks 18%
Photos allow you to convey that you are an industry leader and really connect with people. Why? Because your positive passion is contagious and inspiring! Your expertise is genuinely helpful.
For fitness and personal coaching pros – post quality photos of:
- Yourself to promote your brand
- Your customers and their great results
- Training sessions in action
- Human to human moments and presentations at industry conferences and special events
- Post images that reinforce and link to your very best content: Techniques and strategies that create real value and solve real world problems and pain points for your ideal customers.
Videos measurably help your posts (28% more retweets). Feel free to repurpose a demonstration video that you used elsewhere for Twitter. 74% of survey respondents believed a video helped them better understand a company’s offerings. If you have a strong value proposition – that means more business!
Between these two types of content, images get 128% more retweets than videos. Although most leading content marketers see quality video as the most effective for generating sales and new business, making good videos is the most time consuming form of content creation, – next to writing great articles and blog posts like this one!
Quick Note: GIFs are now allowed on Twitter. Make sure your GIF runs on a loop or it will come across as a static image.
Twitter Speak 101 – What to Say and How to Say It
If you know your business but are not a Twitter wordsmith yet, you might struggle with how to word tweets and even what to tweet. Several items work best on Twitter.
- Use Straightforward Language- With only 140 characters, marketing content needs to get to the point quickly and simply. Unlike other social media sites, companies see a big payoff from using clear, straightforward offers:
- 18% more clicks
- 29% more retweets
Don’t worry about appearing to ‘salesy.’ Research shows that Twitter rewards a direct approach.
#TwitterTip: Social media (Twitter’s no exception) is a great way to promote your fitness business through contests and discounts. Make sure to include this type of content in your Tweets. For example, by:
- Using Powerful Twitter Coupons to offer high click-through online deals that your ideal customers are looking for and ready to pay for right now. How?
TwtQpon.com recently launched an amazing app that lets you quickly customize attention grabbing online product or service deals. This is a potentially a very powerful visual Twitter marketing tool for you.
- Put a (Shortened) Link in It- 92% of user interactions on Twitter are link clicks. With only 140 characters, you need to shorten links. Best practices for links mean:
- Place links about ¼ way through your tweet
- Use the free version of Bitly to shorten and #keyword customize your links.
- Share links to great content frequently (no brainer!). This action helps gain followers. And most of all, share strong:
- Tweets from and For Others- We discussed the importance of good content. There are some amazing Twitter management tools with features that allow you to find out what content your prospects want to see.
It’s also really useful to get into the habit of paying attention to the #hashtags industry leaders are using to connect with their customers. Here’s how to find and quickly learn from top Twitter influencers in your niche:
- Buzzsumo– lets you find the best and most sharable online content for your niche fast. This is great for building deep-engagement tweets or just pain tweeting directly from a post. It’s also amazing for getting great ideas to write highly sharable business blog post that people will love to read and share!
Buzzsumo helps you find the most important Twitter influencers to follow or to actively engage, especially if they’re already following you! You can also explore which posts are getting the strongest social signals and get a good sense of traffic levels on competitor websites and blogs.
- SocialRank Lets you explore your Twitter followers in very important ways. You get an email each month telling you who you need to be engaging with the most from your Twitter community. For example, you get to see which people following you are more likely to retweet and interact with you in real time.
- Nuzzel– skims the tweets of everyone you follow to recommend content that will be most engaging for them. That means more high value content to Tweet and fresh content creation ideas tailored directly for your own growing Twitter community.
You don’t need to play detective. The most powerful Twitter tools bring information to you!
- Graciousness- Studies demonstrate that certain words are very effective in tweets. Tweets with you, please, retweet, post, and Twitter get the most retweets. Make sure your most important tweets include one or more of those five words.
If you need to limit characters, use abbreviations (shorter tweets are better). If you ask people to RT (retweet), you get 10X the retweets of someone who does not ask at all.
- Verbs- Start each tweet with a verb to like, watch, listen (for videos or podcasts) or share. This conveys and directs follower action. More specifically, posts beginning with verbs gain 13% more clicks on average. Not surprisingly, two of the five most important words, post and retweet, are verbs!
In short, ask viewers to act on your offers.
Polish up a Tweet
In addition to great visual content and verbiage, there are other things you can do to really improve your Twitter marketing.
- Symbols- Punctuation like exclamation points, quotation marks, and the @ sign increase the effectiveness of retweets.
Exclamation points create excitement. You want people to take action now! When you quote individuals who are relevant to your business, it makes you look like a real leader in your profession.
In the same manner, the @ symbol means you mention others in the tweet. I cannot say it enough: you want to build relationships with people who promote your brand. Using @ improves the click rates on your links and enables you to promote another’s business making you a more valuable follower to them in the process.
- Place a Hashtag or Two- Want retweets? The presence of one or more hashtags increases the likelihood of a retweet 55%.
There are some amazing Twitter tools with features to measure the effectiveness of your hashtags:
RiteTag helps you find the most effective #hashtags for your niche and teaches you how to phrase your own high value #hashtags. Tweetdeck allows you to monitor the performance of your #hashtags.
- Treat Tweets Like Headlines- A great headline gets you to click on an article. The same principle is at work on Twitter.
- Numbers!
Tweets with numbers have 17% more retweets than ones without any digits. Don’t just state, ‘My workout is effective’. Quantify it with the real numbers. For example:
“Increase Your Indoor Cycling Endurance by 25% in 3 Weeks!”
We live in a world where people want measurable results yesterday. Give it to them.
- Time It Right- Business owners want to make the best use of their time. Tweets posted on:
- Monday-Thursday
- Between 1pm-3pm
- Weekends are great for less formal engagement, sharing and active community building
You do not need to set aside to much time for your Twitter posting each day. Great scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Buffer help you strategically plan tweets in advance.
#TwitterTip: Once you have your first 5-10 thousand Twitter followers and enough high quality created and curated content under your belt – don’t be afraid to RT your posts with much more frequently during peak sharing times.
Tweeting as often as every 15 minutes via automation can actually increase your objective Twitter engagement levels and get you more targeted followers, clicks and shares compared to less frequent manual posting. But be sure that you’re engaging your followers during those peaks times as well.
The Quick List
It doesn’t have to take more than 20 minutes a day on Twitter to get business results. But you need strategic discipline and focus to build an effective digital marketing presence there.
A checklist organizes information and keeps the most valuable tasks from falling through the cracks. To summarize, make sure your tweet has:
- Visuals
- Verbs
- Graciousness
- #Hashtags
- Links
- Punctuation & Symbols
- Numbers
- Twitter Sales Coupons
- Timing
Quick Tip: You craft a tweet with all of these elements or varying combinations and it works great. If your business gets pressed for time, just use a high performing tweet again. Recycled tweets garner almost as many clicks as the original tweet.
Create Tweets that Work for You
Twitter can really help brand you as an online industry expert and seriously improve your sales. However, the stats cited at the beginning indicate that companies are just not Twitter marketing effectively to promote their brands. That’s ok! Follow these steps and make Twitter really work for YOUR business!