How To Attract Customers With Twitter
How To Attract Customers With Twitter
How To Attract Customers With Twitter
Learn How to
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INTRODUCTORY
Introductory content is for marketers who are new to the subject. This content typically includes step-by-step instructions on how to get started with this aspect of inbound marketing and learn its fundamentals. Read our introductory-level ebook, How to Use Twitter for Business.
INTERMEDIATE
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Intermediate content is for marketers who are familiar with the subject but have only basic experience in executing strategies and tactics on the topic. This content typically covers the fundamentals and moves on to reveal more complex functions and examples. After reading it, you will feel comfortable leading projects with this aspect of inbound marketing.
ADVANCED
Advanced content is for marketers who are, or want to be, experts on the subject. In it, we walk you through advanced features of this aspect of inbound marketing and help you develop complete mastery of the subject. After reading it, you will feel ready not only Share This Ebook! to execute strategies and tactics, but also to teach others how to be successful.
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optimize the branding of your twitter profile 6 Steps to optimize twitter for search twitter etiquette for business
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6 IDEAS TO JUMP START YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY /26 how to measure the roi of twitter
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Whether youve read my book Twitter for Dummies or not, we know youre no dummy when it comes to making Twitter work for your business. Were glad you dropped by HubSpot to learn more. Twitters come a long way, baby, and so have you! Ready to dig in past the basics and start showing the rest of your company what Twitter can really do? Awesome. You came to the right spot. Ever wonder how to make the best use of Twitters promoted products to advertise on Twitter? Got it. Unsure what to do about measuring it all? Well explain that too. Well even show you how to close the loop between marketing and sales with trackable links so you know what new leads and customers are coming from your Twitter efforts. Hope youll enjoy putting these suggestions to work, and join us at Inbound 2012 to keep learning more about inbound marketing with platforms like Twitter.
Warmly,
Laura @Pistachio Fitton Inbound Marketing Evangelist, HubSpot Lead author, Twitter for Dummies
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The marketing world is transforming into an inbound one. With over 100 million active Twitter accounts, this social network is becoming omnipresent in the business world. The problem marketers now face isnt simply how to use Twitter, but how to turn it into a closed-loop marketing process. This ebook will delve into how you can take 140-character tweets and turn them into quality leads. Twitter isnt solely home to the basic PR-focused route of creating an appealing brand image. Its a tool for reaching fans of your business who can become leads, and then sending those potential customers to your sales team. As social media scientist Dan Zarrella likes to paraphrase DJ Quik, if it dont make dollars, it dont make sense.
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CHAPTER 1
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Every good business has swag--the way you present your style. And its important that your business swag is unique and visible. Twitter announced official brand pages in the fourth quarter of 2011. Although these pages are not completely rolled out, you should be prepared to take advantage of their business benefits:
Call-to-Action Banners
The new Twitter brand pages will enable businesses to add a customer header under their profile bio. This header is the perfect opportunity to show some more personality--and include a call-toaction (CTA), a link that directs visitors to a desired action you want them to take. Gauge what is important to your specific Twitter audience and create a custom CTA. If your company is running a new social campaign, you can use this header to teach users more about it. In HubSpots case, we could direct users to our ebook on how to use Twitter for business because that is something our Twitter followers would benefit from. Here you can see Disney is using this banner to promote the film Dumbo.
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Featured Tweets
The new brand pages will let you feature a tweet at the top of your Twitter feed. This is a great way to highlight particular campaigns, promotions, or offers which youd like to get more visibility over a longer period of time. The shelf-life of a regular tweet is short, but you can extend it with the use of these featured tweets. You can support these tweets with engaging images and videos to better illustrate your offer and give your lead generation efforts even more potency.
Custom Background
Creating a custom background is one improvement you can make right away. Users who stumble across your profile will expect to see basic branding, such as company name, logo, and URLs. Read the step-by-step instructions below and follow along during this video tutorial to whip together an awesome custom Twitter background. Your background can be made with the following measurements using any design software.
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STEP 2
Since a timeline (or feed) of activity exists in the center of every Twitter screen, you need to ensure that the background is never covered up by this feed. The trick here is to ensure that the text and images are viewable on any screen size (i.e. the feed doesnt cut it off on a 13 screen laptop because the background was made on a 15 screen). To ensure you are working in the safe spot, pull out a marker over the 300-pixel mark on the horizontal ruler in your design software. Share This Ebook!
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To do so, simply click on the vertical ruler and drag until the line touches 300 on the horizontal ruler. This marker will not appear in your final product, it is simply an indicator for you to keep all your work inside that selected area. (If youre working off of a design software that doesnt have a marker, simply draw a line, and delete it after).
STEP 3
Paint the entire canvas one color. Alternatively, you could insert an image that takes up the entire background. Just be sure you own the rights to the image you choose, and consider how it will look when part of it is covered up by the Twitter feed. A solid color is always a safe option. Its also easier on the eyes.
STEP 4
Keep it shor t.
At this point, youre free to write the text and add whatever images you choose to the 300-pixel wide, left-hand column we created. For HubSpots Twitter background, we simply added our company name, a brief bio, URLs for our website and social networks, and our company logo. Nothing too crazy. What you choose should reflect your companys identity and should also be simple. Twitter is the world of 140-character updates for a reason. Users are used to brevity, so keep it short. Share This Ebook!
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STEP 6
Lastly, go to your personal or company Twitter profile, and head over to settings. This option is listed in a drop-down menu under your Twitter username on the upper right-hand side. Once youve navigated to settings, click the design tab and select change background image. Upload your background, save changes, and your beautiful and custom background will appear right before your eyes.
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CHAPTER 2
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Ensure that your Twitter handle and updates are helping your business rank in search.
Now that youre presentable to the Twitter world, lets ensure users find you in search engine results as well. That way, your Twitter handle and updates are assisting your entire marketing program by helping your business rank in search for industry keywords. While you want your website to be the first hitwhy not have your Twitter posts display a few links below? When it comes to search engine optimization, its okay to be greedy: You dont want just the number one spot; you want as many as you can get.
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inbound links
Twitter SEO
keywords subset
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spam free
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Keep in mind that search engines often display your Twitter bio in the links description on the results pages, so make it attention grabbing.
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STEP 3
This may sound like a no-brainer, but gaining a following, with high quality followers is important for SEO purposes. In an interview Google and Bing the two companies said that their algorithms check the authority of every user tweeting content. We do compute and use author quality, said a Google representative. We dont know who anyone is in real life :-)
STEP 4
to rank for, all those keywords may not translate over easily to Twitter--especially if theyre lengthy. Analyze your keywords through various tools (HubSpot customers use our Keyword tool), and pick a smaller subset of keywords day in your tweets to help boost your rankings. specifically for Twitter. Use these phrases throughout the
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STEP 5
In order to ensure your SEO-ready keywords are not deleted when a user shares your tweet via RT @username, you need to make sure tweets have a solid 10-20 characters of legroom. If the danger of losing your keywords isnt convincing enough, data shows that 120-130 character tweets also have the highest clickthrough rates (CTR).
STEP 6
Now its time to make your content remarkable enough that other influencers are retweeting it. Google and Bing representatives shared that search engines will register the value of Twitter authority figures and correlate it with the value of the link posted. So search engines are analyzing the number of followers a user who retweets your content has in order to give the retweeted link its proper value of importance-- the Twitter equivalent of an inbound link. Posting updates that appeal to influencers will inevitably boost your optimization efforts.
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CHAPTER 3
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Now lets cut down the amount of time you spend monitoring Twitter and optimize results. Heres a few ways to do so without sounding like a robot and constantly replying to every tweet.
tip 1
While replying back to every tweet with an upbeat thank you is sweet, theres little value in making this a habit. You should be replying to two types of tweets on an ongoing basis: questions and negative comments.
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When you know the answer to a question, answer it. If you dont know the answer, ask someone at your company who does. A social media manager is not hired to be in charge of knowing responses they deserve. 64% of users are more likely to purchase from businesses that answer their questions on twitter.
More Likely As Likely Less Likely
every little intricacy, but to manage them. Use your resources well and give Twitterers the proper
64% of Twitter are more likely to make purchases from businesses that answer their questions on Twitter.
]
Source: InboxQ (Survey)
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tip 2
Wouldnt it be great if the tip recommended above could be done privately? Thats precisely why its so important to follow back users who follow you. If they have a question, most will try to DM you, but Twitter will only allow them to send direct messages if you are following them.
tip 3
Message m privately. e
Twitter differentiates between a reply and a mention by where you place the Twitter handle in the composed tweet. By placing it in the beginning of your update (e.g, @ numinews I read your...), Twitter registers the tweet as a reply, because you are responding directly to the user.
Placing the Twitter handle elsewhere would make it a mention. So by replying directly to a user, that tweet will only appear on your profile page and the feeds of people who follow you both. You may notice users dodging this by including a period in front of their tweet (.@numinews). When responding to a Twitter user, decide whether you want that tweet to be seen by everyone or not. If youre simply saying thank you, theres no need to make that tweet visible. If someone addresses you with a positive comment, however, you may want to respond with Hey @ numinews, so that the tweet is seen by anyone who is following you.
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tip 4
Scheduling tweets is simply a step to help minimize the amount of time you spend scripting tweets each day. By knowing you have a steady amount of content that will automatically publish, you are giving yourself more time to follow where that content is going, how its being discussed, and what leads its generating for you. HubSpot has a social media publisher that allows you to schedule multiple tweets at once. Think of clever ways to promote your content ahead of time. By allocating ten minutes to composing a batch of tweets for the day--right out of your HubSpot software--you can focus on other work throughout the day.
If youre not a HubSpot user, you can use HootSuite for scheduling. Now all you have to do is check in occasionally to see what people are saying and respond accordingly. Much easier than worrying, or worse, forgetting, that you have to tweet. Share This Ebook!
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Even equipped with the best practices shared above, many businesses get lost in the Twitterverse and end up using the social tool in a non-customer-friendly way. This behavior is often due to some common myth in the Internet marketing space. Lets tackle three of these misconceptions and discuss whats wrong with each of them.
myth 1
Longer Membership
Shorter Membership
Many users boast about how they were on Twitter before it became mainstream. But your Twitter presence is not measured by time; its measured by value. People follow other users to receive information they wouldnt stumble across on their own. So make sure to post truly valuable content, not simply spam about your product or service. And remember, the worth of that engagement has little-to-nothing to do with how long youve been present on the site. So lets change the variables. Share This Ebook!
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myth 2
While its true that tweets have a short shelf life, it doesnt necessarily mean you should be a tweeting machine. With tweets sent every second, your most recent updates move down a users feed almost instantly, and constant tweets can irk your followers. Our data shows that 15-25 tweets per day is the sweet spot for increasing following. While this sounds overwhelming, understand that its merely the average; you can fluctuate above and below. Whats important to take away is that posting too much too often can decrease your opportunities to grow reach.
myth 3
Following Customers
Are you following industry leaders to learn from the insights they share? Following competitors to keep an eye on their messaging? Great! But what about your customers and evangelists? Many businesses ignore these folks--which makes no sense. If brand loyalists are willing to publicly show they follow your company and talk about you, doesnt it intuitively make sense to send them some love back? Twitter is about two-way communication. Dont leave your fans out to dry--theyll likely just unfollow you.
? Follow birds
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CHAPTER 4
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The biggest mistake marketers make with Twitter is not realizing it can make you money.
The biggest mistake marketers make with Twitter is not realizing it can make you money. And from a business standpoint, why would we do anything that doesnt have the ability to show a return on investment (ROI)? Twitter is still a place of positive brand communication and conversation, but its also a place to generate leads. When it comes down to it, your business needs to test what works best for lead generation. You cant do everything, and what works for one business may not work for yours. Heres a list of ideas weve experienced success with. Use a few as a starting point and build your own strategy by following what works for your business.
idea 1
TWEET OFFERS
This is the simplest form of lead generation: share your offers! Control how often you share your offers to ensure your account doesnt turn into a spam-bot. This will be contingent upon your business. For example, a recruiter will be more likely to repeatedly share offers to job openings because users will naturally be vested in that opportunity. However, users may not be as willing to download the same whitepaper about, for instance, improving heating systems. Have difficulties coming up with content ideas? Here is an ebook that will help you out. Share This Ebook!
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idea 2
If you have a blog, be sure to tweet links to all your posts (which should themselves have . call-to-action featured in them). This is an indirect but effective way to attract new leads. If possible, connect your blog with Twitter so that a post gets tweeted the minute its published automatically. For HubSpot customers, the HubSpot software can automatically set this up for you.
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idea 3
.When a user sends a question your way, use the opportunity to give them proper feedback. When possible, and only when helpful to the user, add a landing page link to your response. For example, one user tweeted his Marketing Grader grade, adding commentary about how he wanted to improve his overall score by improving his website presence. @HubSpot responded with a link to our ebook, 25 Website Must Haves for Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales. The user appreciated our beneficial--not spammy--response. He filled out the form and received the information he needed to improve his score. Oh, and it looks like we got a lead along the way!
idea 4
HASHTAGS
.Theres more to hashtags than simply adding a pound sign in front of a word. In fact, simply adding a hashtag to a tweet isnt going to give you any results; you need to integrate them to a marketing campaign.
If you see a trending hashtag that is relevant to your tweet, include it in your updates. If you see a user tweeting with a particular hashtag, include it in your retweet. This will allow your tweets to reach anyone who is looking at tweets for that particular hashtag. When hosting an event, create a hashtag so users can chime in and you aggregate a list of tweets from potential leads. For example, HubSpots weekly video podcast, the Marketing Update, comes paired with the hashtag #MKTGUP. This allows our hosts to include user commentary in the show and measure how many users are actively tuning in.
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idea 5
BUILD REACH
Whats the use of following any of the above suggestions if youre not reaching anyone? This is where you need to revisit the basics of Twitter and remember to spend time building your following. The more people youre sending information to, the higher your chance of generating leads. To learn more ways to attract more social media fans and followers, read this in-depth post. HubSpots software can also give you a quick snapshot of your social media reach:
idea 6
TWITTER CHAT
Twitter chats are the next level of hashtags. From a business standpoint, a Twitter chat is an online discussion between a brand and the Twitter world. While there is no set format, HubSpot hosts its weekly Twitter chat by asking an expert from the marketing team about five to seven questions over a half an hour period via the hashtag #inboundchat. Share This Ebook!
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@HubSpot will RT what other users are saying and help answer follow-up questions that the expert was unable to get to. To help push lead generation efforts, each chat comes paired with a certain offer. For example, our chat on Twitter for Business came paired with, well this ebook! Our @inboundchat about Pinterest was accompanying another ebook.
Keep in mind this platform of discussion may not work for every business, and the only way to find out is to try it! Figure out how you want to format your chat and give it a few test runs. Dont simply host one event and quit. You can also join one of the nearly 600 regularly scheduled Twitter chats on a huge variety of industry topics. Depending on your business, joining rather than creating a chat may prove more beneficial.
#In
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CHAPTER 5
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Everything stated in this ebook is absolutely useless unless youre measuring your efforts.
Everything stated in this ebook is absolutely useless unless youre measuring your efforts along the way. Only through analyzing Twitter marketing data, you can pull insights and evaluate if youre spending your time wisely to benefit your business.
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Loop d e Clos rketing Ma
Twitter, however, doesnt have a seamless way to check your analytics. Closed-loop marketing is what you should be looking at to track the power of Twitter compared to your other channels. This means tracking the path of a user clicking a link in a tweet, to visiting a page on your website, to filling out a landing page to become a lead, and, ultimately, to converting into a customer. And isnt that ultimately why youre using Twitter for business in the first place? To bring in new customers?
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Lets have a deeper look into getting that ultimate ROI. There are four key steps to the process:
step 1
To see how many visitors are coming to your site via Twitter, youll need an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics or HubSpot. While Google Analytics is free, the benefit of using HubSpot is that you can directly see how many leads are generated through Twitter. Once you tie your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, like Salesforce and SugarCRM, to your marketing software, like HubSpot, you can close the loop between your Twitter marketing efforts and sales. Now there is a two-way communication between your marketing activities and sales results. When you visit your inbound marketing analytics, youll see not only the visitors, but also the number of leads and customers Twitter brought in. Now you can compare Twitter marketing to your other channels.
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step 2
Now that you have an analytics tool, you have to overcome the issue of third-party Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck. If a Twitterer is sharing a link to your blog post from such a client, it might not show up in your analytics as a visit from Twitter, even though that link is ultimately being shared on Twitter. This can greatly impact your data. The solution is a tracking token. A tracking token is added to the end of a link, allowing your analytics tool to pool a certain group of traffic. Different tools employ different tokens, but a generic one looks like this: /?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter By attaching this to your link, anyone who clicks that link is signaling to your analytics tool that they are coming from Twitter. The same type of tracking tokens apply to different channels, such as email, paid media and referral traffic. Investigate with your marketing or analytics software to make sure you have the tracking tokens in place and your data gets assigned to the right categories. HubSpots social media publisher, for instance, places tracking tokens automatically to our updates.
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step 3
At HubSpot we look at our analytics constantly. As a data-driven marketer, you should be following your progress monthly, if not weekly. Here are the metrics we recommend you to keep track of: Twitter Follower month-to-month growth By pulling the number of Twitter followers and net new followers, you can get a sense of your Twitter reach growth monthly. For example, if you were to compute the following growth in March, you would pull the numbers from February and March:
(March Twitter Followers -- February Twitter Followers) / February Twitter Followers = Growth %
Tracking this percentage monthly will allow you to see whether your tweeting strategies and campaigns are helping to boost your reach, or have become a waste of time.
Twitter Visitor-to-Lead Rate Similarly, by pulling Twitter visitor numbers and Twitter lead numbers, you can create another percentage to watch your lead growth.
Twitter Visitors / Twitter Leads = Visitor to Lead Rate
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Keeping track of your Twitter visitor-to-lead growth rate will help ensure your social tactics are translating into leads for your sales team. If you want to track this growth more closely to see how specific campaigns impact it, you can create daily goals. Decide on the number of leads you want to generate monthly. Divide that number by the number of business days in that month, and that will give you your daily goal. Your monthly goal should sprout from an understanding of what your leads have looked like in recent months. Dont set a goal of 1,000 if last month you had 150. You can take the same approach to your other social media channels, like Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. HubSpots marketing software keeps track of that social media visitor-to-lead rate, so you dont have to maintain various excel spreadsheets to get these insights:
If you would like to set this up for your organization, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of HubSpot and explore how your social media stats look like. Share This Ebook!
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step 4
Youve executed the tweeting strategy, set up the proper tracking system, and earned some leads. Now should you pass these new contacts directly to sales? Twitter leads, one might argue, are not qualified enough for a conversation with sales. That is where lead nurturing comes into play. Now you should follow-up with your leads, offer them more of the resources they are interested in and get them further educated in your product or service. Whether you decide to nurture these new Twitter leads through simple drip marketing or more sophisticated behavior-based communication, you need to focus on getting them further down the sales funnel. Here is an example of what that follow-up process might look like if you are using HubSpots marketing software:
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tool 1
TWITTER COUNTER
One of the fundamental metrics to track is your follower growth. TwitterCounter allows you to easily examine your follower growth over time. More importantly, you can see your net new number of followers per day by hovering over each day. This data can be used to see how many new followers a certain campaign garnered on the day it launched. If your following remains constant over time, this could indicate that youre not using Twitter as well as you could. Your goal should always be to increase followers so that your reach grows. As stated before, more reach results in more leads and customers. Share This Ebook!
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tool 2
While Twitter may not have a beautiful analytics tool, it does have a beautiful advanced search tool. This search tool allows you to break down your search terms very specifically: by content, users, location, etc. This feature helps you track the success of a specific tweet and story.
For example, when in 2011 HubSpot acquired marketing automation company Performable we could run a search looking for tweets with the words Performable to see how many people were interested in the news. In a similar fashion, you can use this search tool when running campaigns to see if your efforts sparked any conversation.
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tool 3
HASHTAGS REVISTED
Another successful way to track how well a certain campaign is performing is to label it with a hashtag. Sites such as HooteSuite and Hashtracking allow you to see how many times a hashtag has been used. Furthermore, they can help you track a topic beyond what you say about it or beyond what you link to.
For example, HubSpot started an #inboundjobs hashtag which any company can include in their tweets to look for inbound marketing candidates. Potential applicants (a recruiters potential leads) can find jobs via this hashtag. Now we can track the popularity of inbound job openings and opportunities through the hashtag, even if we arent the ones linking to or talking about a job posting.
tool 4
BITLY
Many of you know about bit.ly. It not only allows you to shorten links to be Twitter friendly, but it also provides you with the ability to analyze the number of clicks on that specific link.
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Hopefully you have picked up by now that Twitter is more than a network for engaging in the conversation and creating a positive brand image. The days of updating on-the-go tweets and leaving it at that are over. You must test and analyze all your efforts to understand whether its even in your business best interest to be vesting much time on Twitter. Dont invest a ton of effort in marketing on Twitter unless you can measure the results of your activities. If your closed-loop marketing process leads to extremely low leads and ROI, then its okay to back off and only maintain your account rather than use it heavily. Test the waters on other social media channels and find the one which provides your business with marketing dollars. In conclusion, be smart about the way you prioritize your marketing initiatives and keep an eye on the specific benefits this social network can offer your business. Good luck! Share This Ebook!
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