Twitter has set its roots deep when it comes to influencing the masses. From top-rated brands to local businesses, Twitter has become a mandatory platform for all.
But unlike other social media platforms, trending on Twitter needs specialised efforts and tricks. From a crisp bio to short posts with carefully planned hashtags, Twitter is the ultimate source of fleeting entertainment.
It has emerged as one of the most followed social media sites in recent times since its launch in March 2006.
Countless brands are persistently tweeting to cash in on the Twitter trending charts. If you are still wondering about your odds for Twitter in 2024, we got your back. Here are 8 foolproof ways to make the essential cut.
8 Hacks to get your brand trending on Twitter
1. Introduce your brand in an inclusive and interactive manner
Introduction creates the first impression, and that starts with your bio. Ensure that your Twitter Bio is brief, concise, and has complete information about your brand.
It should provide precise details about your brand and its products/services. Furthermore, an integral part of your bio should be a link to your website.
According to HubSpot, the following are a few of the impressive Twitter bios
- @Uberfacts: The most unimportant things you’ll never need to know
- @FranksRedHot: I put that $#!t on everything. Including Twitter.
- @popchips: the official #popchips Twitter. Eating and tweeting like it’s our job (which it is).
Case Study
Pictures and images have a greater impact on people than mere text. Try posting pictures, videos and GIFs on your Twitter profile rather than sticking to only text-based tweets.
Let’s have a closer look at one of the most trending Twitter profiles—Starbucks!
Starbucks is known as one of the best brands using Twitter to increase brand value and consumer engagement. Their replies and tweets are well thought out, witty and out-of-the-box.
One of their strategies includes constant retweets from other accounts to keep their page updated with new information. Apart from merely sticking to the retweeting trend, Starbucks has also taken their consumer engagement to another level.
They have a designated account, known as @StarbucksCare, where consumers can submit their queries and complaints to enhance their Starbucks experience. The brand makes sure that every feedback is addressed and that each tweet is replied to at the earliest.
2. Tweet, tweet, and further retweet
There’s only one way to stay active on Twitter, and that’s by tweeting about your brand regularly. Nobody follows a brand that doesn’t make any effort to reach out to its customers and fails to update its social media. Tweeting will surely help you reach out to your audience base with a targeted approach.
But tweeting alone isn’t sufficient. It’s necessary to also interact with your followers as well as people that notice your tweets. Make sure you appreciate the likes and responses you get on each tweet and encourage a conversation with these users.
It will help you gain a steady stream of followers in return. Following tweeters of your industry or related fields will also bring added value to your Twitter account. Retweeting their tweets can help enhance your popularity too.
3. Hashtag is your way to glory
Hashtags are crucial for digital marketing and promotional activities. Using trending hashtags on Twitter is one of the easiest ways to get new followers. All you have to do is look out for trending Twitter topics and contribute to them from your brand’s perspective.
Try striking a resemblance and connecting trending Twitter topics with your brand’s content. It amplifies your reach to the followers of those hashtags, and soon tweeters will encounter your brand while doing a relevant search.
Although a rule to keep in mind is don’t overuse hashtags for your Twitter marketing campaign. Usage of 1-2 hashtags is likely to get you as much as 21% higher engagement. At the same time, by using more than two hashtags, you are likely to experience a drop of 17% in your engagement.
Let’s glance at how Red Bull pulled off its campaigns with the correct usage of hashtags.
Case Study
One of the brands that made the most efficient use of hashtags is Red Bull. Instead of merely using hashtags to draw attention to their Twitter page, they started a trend revolving around their brand.
The trend began when a Twitter user posted an image of him holding a Red Bull carefully juxtaposed to a Mini Cooper promotional car in the background. This gave the illusion of a car that the brand itself created.
Within a few months, Twitter exploded with people holding Red Bull cans cleverly to click fascinating pictures. More than 10,000 pictures were posted using the same hashtag #PutACanOnIt.
It helped the hashtag #PutACanOnIt become one of the most successful campaigns on the social network in 2014. It was a 100% organic and 99% user-driven campaign.
4. Organizing an event with Twitter
A lot of companies use Twitter for marketing and promoting their events. You can create enough buzz around your event using Twitter. Create some specific hashtags around your event. Start using them actively before the start of your event to build up momentum and garner enough attention about the same. Encourage your employees, contestants, and sponsors to use these hashtags to lay a strong foundation for the event.
Don’t forget to geotag your events, i.e. adding your event location. This helps drive traffic to your event. Moreover, geotagging can also help you target a particular place to garner more attention from the people of that specific city/town.
Case Study
The diaper brand, Luvs, created a campaign called ‘sleep utility vehicles’. It was directed towards raising awareness about the brand in the local market of Brooklyn.
The brand offered a free taxi ride to parents who didn’t own cars and were troubling to put their crying babies to sleep. All they had to do was tweet to @Luvs with the hashtag #LullabyLift, which would provide them a free ride so they could rock their babies to sleep. They got a charter ride until their babies would fall asleep. Post which, they received a bag full of Luvs diapers that promised a good sleep for infants.
5. Leveraging tools for effective targeting
Targeting is an easy job, but targeting the right people is the actual struggle for most social media users and marketers. According to Kissmetrics, you can break down demographics into 3 groups: industry influencers, amplifiers, and target audience.
Besides the target audience, brands rely on influential people to share their message with their chosen audience. But how do you find the right influencers?
Fortunately, there are ample tools available to build and manage influencer connections. One such tool is Followerwonk, a free tool by Moz, that helps you find relevant influencers based on topic and location on Twitter. You can also refer to some of the best Followerwonk alternatives for the same purpose.
Demographics Pro App is another free Twitter tool that promptly determines whether the influencer’s audience is relevant and suitable for your brand. Here, you can also view important data such as age, income, profession, and location of your followers.
Then you have, TweeTap, which is an easy-to-use tool that aids you in building an instant connection with anyone on Twitter. You can analyze keywords and monitor your brand mentions. With its search option, you can dig in information related to anything. E.g., if you want to search for influencers, TweeTap will curate all content with the word influencers in Twitter for the past week and show you its detailed usage analysis.
Case Study
MVMT Watches (@mvmt) manufactures watches with leather or steel wristbands. It uses Twitter to update its followers and to share user-generated content. It also responds to its customers’ questions on Twitter. Valuable content is more engaging, gets shared on Twitter and other social platforms, and provides good content ROI to the marketers.
In order to boost traffic and subsequent sales during the busy holiday shopping period, they partnered with 3Q Digital (@3QDigital) to create a conversion campaign on Twitter.
MVMT Watches targeted a wide range of demographics, but the core audiences were men aged 18-34 in the US and international markets such as the UK and Australia.
The results were absolutely rewarding. It showed a 353% increase in sales and a 189% rise in website traffic on Black Friday and Cyber Monday compared to the daily average for the rest of Q4.
6. Win influencers with discounts and special deals
While enhancing your Twitter engagement, keeping the number of your followers greater than the number of profiles you follow is key to looking like you are a brand worthy of garnering more followers. It is also advisable to follow relevant industry leaders to keep you in line with all the recent trends and updates.
Your involvement in Twitter should not be restricted to your customers and target audience but also include influencers who significantly impact your potential customers.
Targeting influencers might result in impactful retweets. You can even try to win them over by offering special deals and discounts. This widens up opportunities for them to promote you by organizing exciting contests.
Such promotions help you a lot in gaining instant appreciation from users. Contests like “the first 100 people who retweet this will get a gift hamper” always help create interest and excitement. You are guaranteed a higher rate of engagement by conducting them. Short quizzes or polls are easier for users to interact with, and therefore, help you get more responses.
All of these tips will ultimately help your brand get its fair share of popularity from the influencers you are targeting. Don’t forget to tag and mention relevant people. It is important, especially, when participating in a trending event/topic.
Case Study
Several brands have taken consumer engagement to the next level by using Twitter. For instance, the electronics brand LG wanted to boost the sales of its smartphones in 2013. The targeted age group was between 16-24. As per the campaign rules, whosoever would find their new stall in the UK first would be rewarded with free tickets to a high-profile concert.
However, the online map to the location zoomed in only if the tag #LGTicketHunter was used. The campaign received 5,000 tweets on the first day. This campaign helped LG quadruple their sales of smartphones among their targeted age group owing to the immense response that they received.
7. Growing importance of Twitter lists
Millions of tweeple frequently tweet, and it becomes challenging to read the content you want to see on your feed. If you are also struggling to navigate through Twitter, we highly advise you to set up Twitter lists.
A list is a curated group of Twitter accounts. You can create your lists or subscribe to lists created by others. Viewing a list timeline will show you a stream of tweets from limited accounts.
Note: List names can’t begin with a number or exceed 25 characters.
Twitter lists are probably the most underutilized yet robust feature. Most users don’t know about its existence or how to use it effectively for a Twitter strategy.
Here’s how you can utilize it effectively. Think of all the ways you’d like to segregate or group the types of people on your feed. You can make lists of celebrities, activity-related, influencers, new followers, retweeters, and tweeple who often respond to your tweets, people from chats or events, and co-workers. These lists make engaging with Twitter followers, sharing articles, and retweeting incredibly easy.
Case Study
During the annual UFC Summit in Las Vegas, hundreds of UFC, TUF, and WEC fighters were motivated to join Twitter. It became challenging for the UFC to identify each fighter, verify their authenticity, and inform the public.
But displaying the credibility of authentic fighter accounts and publicizing them to fans posed a bigger challenge. UFC then created a master list of fighters on Twitter and shared it on official UFC accounts (i.e., @DanaWhite and @UFC) to spread the word.
Initially, they struggled with fraud accounts and inconsistencies. About 47 fighter accounts were then listed on the UFC Twitter list. However, more than 200 non-UFC Twitter accounts crept into the list.
The Twitter account of Frank Mir, one of the UFC’s most well-known fighters, @TheFrankMir, was hard to distinguish from 7 fraud accounts. However, after @UFC publicized the ‘fighter list,’ Frank Mir’s real account went from 4 followers to 2,600 in less than 12 hours.
8. A/B Testing and Twitter analytics
It is imperative to test everything, be it your Adwords copy, landing page, subject lines of emails, or headlines of articles and blogs. A comprehensive and constant test ultimately optimizes the end result. Similar tests and checks do apply to social media as well.
And for this, A/B Testing comes into the picture. It permits you to be in charge of (A) and put it up against a challenger (B). It is not restricted to testing landing pages and related advertisements. You can also run A/B tests on your Twitter account for free. Most of the tests focus on conversion rates.
To begin with, you can test your existing tweets. You can check for quotes, stats, headings, links, descriptions, and other items you usually tweet about. Test your tweets with and without other content, i.e., video, gifs, links, etc. Also, you could test tweets with a similar image but alternative text. The impact and relevance of hashtags can also be tested by tweeting the same content using various hashtags.
To help you work more efficiently, you can create an excel sheet with three divisions to list tweet content, tweet URL, and image to be used with a particular tweet. Use Twitter automation tools to schedule your tweets at suitable time slots. Once your tweets have been posted multiple times, you can export your data using Twitter analytics tools.
If your Twitter audience is vast, you may not need to post your tweets multiple times. With a good quantity of impressions, your tweets can generate more interactions. These interactions will eventually reflect how engaged your following is with your tweets. Based on the results, you can make adjustments and test again.
Final Words
Brands have become aggressively competitive to gain more popularity on Twitter. But a basic optimization and preliminary understanding of Twitter’s capability can give your brand an edge over the others.
Even in 2024, Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds. It boasts an active user base with millions. You just need to zero in on your target audience to score leads with an apt marketing strategy in place.
With tools like SocialPilot, success is at your fingertips. Utilize the tips mentioned above, leverage most features, participate in Twitter trends, and notice the difference.
