Twitter is an odd place for both casual Tweeters and businesses alike. Personally, it’s where I get relevant information for different trends every day. There’s the usual Twitterstorm of people smiting the shit out of each other, fandoms constantly raving about their favorites, political discourse that turns into a Twitter bloodbath, #FilmTwitter going at it with their top Letterboxd recommendations, and so on.It’s an interesting place for discourse of all sorts. Who says businesses can’t get what they need from Twitter? Its ad system is still a long way from becoming on par with Facebook ads, but there’s still a good chance for you to gain significant traffic from the social platform to your website/offer. Let’s take a deep dive into how you can get those conversions on Twitter (via Sprout Social). The key here is to create content that’s tethered to Twitter’s culture of sending out tweets and interacting with them.
The most logical way to get people to your website is to place it somewhere that’s easily seen. And since people on Twitter love to play around with their Twitter bios, you’ll have a good chance of getting traffic by placing your website in the bio, along with a clever quip that points to it, like, “if you like the stuff I tweet about, this is where most of it comes from: (link)” or something to that effect. You can even do it twice as Twitter also allows you to place a website link on its own designated area, making sure that your “visit my site” message will come across clearly.
My Twitter profile’s pinned tweet is something that I posted in 2017 about me and Batman not being in the same room when shit hits the fan. There’s no offer there, but it stands as one of my most-engaged tweets every year. Again, it’s the first thing that people see when they visit your profile. And if it’s a tweet that has a funny remark or a think piece about a certain topic that you love so dearly, it’s easy to reel people in to click that pinned Tweet. And if you want them to visit your latest blog about why you’re so awesome, you can try lowkey self-promotion by pinning it on top of your profile. Just make sure that you’re updating these pinned posts often and that the landing page is something that would truly have them convert.
Depending on the volume of engagement and the virality of a Tweet, the lifespan of one Tweet has an average of 15 to 20 minutes. So if you’re thinking of doing one to three tweets a day, that’s not exactly a good idea if you want to always be seen as active and get the traffic that you want. What’s more, there are people who prefer to see tweets on their timeline in chronological order and those who let the algorithm decide the things they see (I’m part of the latter, sadly). The trick is to tweet consistently. Coschedule recommends tweeting at least 15 times a day and curating/retweeting 7 times daily. It sounds like quite the task, but once you get the hang of the Twitter culture, it’s easier to hit these things for you to gain traffic. Besides, you can always schedule your tweets accordingly.
The good thing about Twitter is that you don’t need to always tweet something fresh. It can be content that you made a year ago, with an updated description in the tweet. As you plan out your entire Twitter schedule for the week, make it a point to include evergreen content once or twice a day. This helps you figure out which form of messaging could work for your Twitter strategy. You poured your heart out making that content. Don’t let it go to waste!
A common form of polling on Twitter is done in the most creative of ways. Sometimes, it’s just a side by side photo of anything. The measures that they use are Likes and Favorites. So if you’re testing out a product or two forms of service, consider asking your followers to like or retweet it. Make sure that it sounds natural, though. Anything sale-sy on Twitter often gets ignored. You can even meme-ify your Tweets for it to get widespread attention.
Hashtags are the bloodline of Twitter. This is how you can determine a trending topic and how you can jump on it as well. While sharing links are okay, you wouldn’t want all your tweets to be made up of only these things. Using hashtags can also help you gain more visibility and website clicks albeit done in a more Twitter-friendly manner. It pays to do your research about what hashtags are effective for your brand to use. Or heck, you can even make your own hashtag and hope to the gods old and new that it catches on enough to become a trending topic in itself.
While I don’t necessarily recommend promoting your tweets right away, this could be done after you’ve done all the above steps and want to be more aggressive with your Twitter strategy. But with promoting a tweet comes the task of making it look worthy of promotion. Just as you would on a Facebook ad, you have to think about what this tweet would look like. Would it only have a photo attached to it? Perhaps a short video that talks about your business? Or maybe another link that will bring them to a high-converting landing page?