Twitter As An Effective Social Media Marketing Tool

Social media marketing is today one of the most leading marketing strategy. The important goal for every digital marketer is reaching as many niche audience members as possible.

You don't have to hire an SEO specialist to see noticeable gains in your reach. Getting into the habit of applying just a few simple tactics each time you publish a blog post and share it on social media will give you a significant and measurable improvement.

To test this out, before you publish your next blog post, measure your website views, users and blog traffic for the previous week using Google Analytics. Next, publish your blog post and use the following tactics to optimize and promote it on social media. At the end of the week, compare the Google Analytics measurements you took for both weeks. I think you'll be pleased with the results.
 Here are the steps to follow:

Share an optimized post on all relevant social networks

Share a link to your blog post on every social media platform that your target audience uses. Whenever you can, use a picture to call attention to your post. Link posts that include eye-catching pictures get more clicks than links without them. You can and should post pictures with links on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. Also, make sure to use a link shortener such as bit.ly or Buffer. Link shorteners reduce the number of characters your post takes (which is essential on Twitter) and they provide tracking tools to help you measure how much attention your posts receive.

Share repeatedly on Twitter

On Twitter things move VERY fast. So sharing one link to your blog post there isn't likely to get you a lot of attention. My rule of thumb for promoting blog posts on Twitter is:

**two separate times the day of publication
**once the day after publication
**one week later
**two weeks later
**one month later
**two months later

Share at the times when your audience is online

There will be good times for you to share and there will be bad times. These can only be accurately determined by careful observation. But most of the time, your niche audience will display a pattern upon which you can capitalize. The vast majority of social media users are more active between 9 am and 5 pm on the weekdays. But remember to account for the various time zones if your audience is nation-wide or international. Make sure to give your social media friends time to share your content. For instance, publishing a blog post on a Friday afternoon may short-change your potential for retweets, since, in general, fewer Twitter users are online on the weekends.

Keep tweets under 120 characters

If you are reaching out to an audience on Twitter, make sure to leave enough room for your friends to retweet you without having to edit your tweet. Keeping your tweets under 120 characters generally leaves enough room for easy retweeting.

Monitor social media and respond throughout the day

Scheduling your tweets and/or other social media posts using a tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer can save you a lot of time and make life easier. But don't just schedule those posts and forget them. Check throughout the day to see if anyone has responded or tried to initiate a dialog with you. You'll want to respond as quickly as possible. Why? Because social media users have come to expect this and brands that do not respond quickly risk being seen as unapproachable or uncaring.

Use photos in the right dimensions

As mentioned earlier, photos are very important to include whenever you publish a blog and as often as possible when you share your blog posts on social media. But the same picture doesn't always work on all platforms. Make sure you understand the dimension requirements for each social network that you are using. If you're not sure, here's a simple guide created by Sprout Social.

 Use hashtags

Finally, make sure to research, record and use all hashtags used by your target audience that relate to your content. This can usually be done be testing out keywords as search terms on each social media platform, or by following influencers within your niche and noting the hashtags they use. Hashtags help your audience to find your content so they should be included in social media promotions of your content whenever possible.

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Credit: Jenise F.