The world of the Twitterati (pt. 2)
Let’s rewind to this time of the year in 2019 — the treasured corona-free times. Most of us in America had started hearing a little more than usual about a small fast-food chain but, more specifically, its chicken sandwich. Popeyes, the one and only, had started gaining a lot of traction and was pretty much the only thing people were talking about over news, TV, social media, and in-person! None of us can forget the videos with the long queues, the headlines exclaiming how Popeyes was sold out again, and the interestingly increasing demand for chicken sandwiches it led to. Why?
The answer is simple — Twitter.
In 2019, food chains like Popeyes, Wendy’s, and Chick-Fil-A engaged in a viral feud over Twitter about who had the best chicken sandwich. Needless to say, the generation-savvy responses attracted crowds to their social media as well as their products, and the chicken sandwiches almost became a rarity because of how fast they were selling out. I remember I wanted to try and see what the hype about Popeyes was about, but I could not buy a single sandwich in-store until February of 2020.
If you thought social media couldn’t drive much business, I’m here to tell you how surprised I was too when I realized a timely and to-the-point tweet drove massive business for not only a corporation but all of its competition as well. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Twitter is one of the only social media platforms where “going viral” is easy if you know the right tricks. The platform is not only relevant in terms of gaining access to people within your business and industry but is also used by people that loyally and constantly engage through trends and brands. If you don’t agree, log on to Twitter and I can guarantee you will see atleast one BTS hashtag trending every week.
However, driving business and “going viral” over Twitter is best possible through indirect marketing. While you can try to directly market your product, people generally fish around for and engage with content, information, knowledge, and value. Content is king, and that is true for all social media platforms. In order to ensure you get traction on your social media, it is imperative to not do the following every day:
“At the Handewan stores, we ensure you will get the best value from our shopping experiences and assistants to help you personally all day everyday”
“Handewan brings couture and comfort from all over the world to you. Come enjoy and experience luxury at Handewan”
This wording is the kind of thing people would want to see on your Twitter bios, or Google searches, or your website, but not as a Tweet. I wouldn’t want to follow this company because their tweets bring no value to my daily feed. Sure, I might give their website a try and purchase something, but I definitely would not pledge brand loyalty to them or their socials. However, if the following was something I saw in a tweet, I might feel differently:
“Fashion tip of the day — wear boots/doc martens & joggers to look tall. Shoutout to @extra for asking — I def want more #shortgirl tips. Check out Handewan for awesome boots to pair with your joggers. Do comment down below any questions to looking fab in your skin.”
This targets a couple of things. One, I get information regarding fashion. Two, I see engagement with people that are actively asking questions. Three, it is indirectly marketing Handewan as THE company to go to for fashion with the ‘tip of the day’ section. And four, we have a call-to-action by asking people to check out the store and comment. I would be more likely to follow the brand to get more value, and so would you.
Having identified what an engaging and informative tweet looks like, here are some ways I identified through the course of using Twitter that can help you on your journey to build loyalty and business through Twitter:
A. Shortlist Relevant Hashtags for Brand + Social Platform
One of the first points from my previous blog was identifying the right hashtags for your business based on your brand. However, the perfect hashtags are ones that are not only specific to your brand but also to the social platform you are using. It is important to shortlist hashtags that followed by more people on the platform you are using.
Twitter runs on hashtags, so identifying the ones that are followed the most can be hard. To do so, I utilized Best Hashtags and Hashtagify to narrow down the hashtags most relevant for my brand. From there, I tested different hashtags to see what hashtags gained the most traction and attracted more viewership. Each company has a different group of hashtags relevant to their brands, and the faster you figure out what hashtags work best for you, the easier it will be to reach the right people.
B. Binge-watch the “Trending” page
Now, while hashtags do some of the work, they don’t work all the time because you won’t have people looking on #fashion if there’s an Apple product release the same day, resulting in #Apple. Apple, in this case, might just seem like a mere hashtag, but it is not — it’s what is known as a trend. Trends are words or hashtags that are majorly being tweeted about within a particular duration, and trends are imperative to generate impressions.
However, as I suggested with hashtags, make sure to monitor through the thousands of trends to identify the ones that are the most relevant to your company. No one wants to see your company product tweet pop on a #USElections trend page, and it doesn’t look good on your brand if you use brand-irrelevant trends simply for the fact that they are trending.
Once you discover relevant trends, try to incorporate them into tweets ASAP because trends only last for so long. I lucked out when the name of the parent company of my company came up in a huge trend regarding stocks. I immediately drafted a tweet using the name/trend, and within minutes I reached 1000+ people and was able to get the most engagement ever on our page. Therefore, monitor your Twitter as much as possible to look at and jump onto relevant trends.
C. Stick to the Time Crunch
Twitter is massive for viral content, but most viral content on Twitter is on what I like to call a time crunch. Time crunches are basically the duration for which a trend or piece of viral content will remain relevant on Twitter. With each extremely popular trend comes a time crunch, and I cannot emphasize how important it is to jump onto the trend within the time crunch. Time crunches might be the sole reason social media is considered a separate sphere from marketing, and rightfully so in that it demands a lot of time.
The two ways I managed to catch waves of trends and their respective time crunches was by being updated about various events around the world through e-news and newspapers, and always having the ‘trending’ page on Twitter open as a tab on my laptop. You will be surprised as to how much time crunches help in the initial stages of business in terms of getting you enormous reach and awareness for your brand.
D. Best times to post on Twitter post-COVID
Another thing I observed on Twitter was the times when the most people were active on the platform under the assumption that the best times to post would have changed considering work-from-home. Again, I would suggest to always experiment with different times in the initial stages of social media marketing because times to post could always differ for different types of content.
The two time frames post-COVID (IST)that can be considered best times to post post-COVID are as follows:
- 7AM-11AM
This would be around the time most people would be logging in for work. Especially if you are trying to attract international viewership (which is something you should definitely try to incorporate if putting out informative content), this time would be the best time to catch the most people online and see how posts set the precedent for the trends that will be viral for the entire day. This is also the best time to post original/repurposed content. - 3PM-5:30PM
I know it might be surprising that I haven’t included the early afternoon hours in this as has been the norm for Twitter, but with work-from-home, we cannot ignore the fact that people would be actually utilising lunchtime with family or their movie/show of choice. Around this time is when people are actually either starting to relax with workload or are logging off and checking their social media. Most of the trends from the day are viewed and responded to or RT’d around this time, so you can try to utilize this activity by RT-ing more around this point of day.
E. Engage with your followers, your audience, and your industry
Twitter is all about engaging with people as is evident through the massive amounts of people that take to the platform every single day to deliberate, discuss, and drive trends. However, when it pertains to my experience with my company, it is hard to drive engagement in terms of comments and likes since we are in the initial stages of social media and are more focused towards impressions. Nevertheless, two engagement tactics that worked well for my company’s social media inception were as follows:
- Make your audience the heart of your tweets — it is very hard for audiences to not engage if given content that they can connect with. Create content with wording that allow your audiences to connect with your brand. For instance, my company has a followership of the middle-income population but our product is more in demand by the low-income population. Therefore, our messaging targets our followership by asking them to recommend our product to their domestic help or their sabziwala, allowing them to relate with our content. In addition to that, always try to include call-to-actions, polls, and other incentives for audiences to engage with your tweets.
- Tag people relevant to the content of the tweet — This strategy helped my company so much because tagging a relevant leader or brand in your tweets runs the potential of attracting the attention of the followers of the leader/brand as well — especially if the leader/brand RT your tweet. This tactic has worked quite well since most industry leaders are likely to RT your tweets when tagged, so make sure to utilize this tactic as much as possible!
F. Make your space count — the Twitter dynamicism
While it is important to make the 280 characters count, making sure your entire Twitter page or space is relevant is essential to having an account someone would want to follow. In order to do so, it is important to not only create content but to also RT relevant content — leveraging the dynamicism in the dualism of Twitter.
Make sure to find the right balance between content to post and RTs (retweets) because both are imperative to the sucesss of your Twitter handle every single day. Even when you do not have original content to post, repurpose old content or post reviews or links to videos or blogs or any sort of content your company has in their repository every single day. Information is what people run after, and given the right amount of promo material mixed with relevant industry information, you would be well on your way to reel in your audiences.
G. Post content that works best on Twitter
We’ve talked about how to promote the content you put out and who to tag etc., but what about the type of content to post? Keep in mind that you need to have a strong direction of your brand image and identity before deciding the content that works best. However, when it comes to the formats of content that is considered to be the most successful on Twitter, here’s a rundown on the type of content you should produce:
- Tweet with blog post (could be your own or another — do tag the author)
- Tweet with images of people infused with text on the side (telling a story to connect audiences to your brand)
- Tweet with 15–30 second videos (could be informative/story oriented videos)
- Tweet with infographic (less text within the infographic does wonders)
Understanding the world of the Twitterati is essential to drive business because Twitter is still considered to be the best platform to understand what the people think, how the people feel, and to then engage with them on all such matters. In addition to that, considering how many predictions on social media for 2021 through Hootsuite, Monday, and many other social marketing blog sites highlight the fact that brands are looking to invest more in Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, it is important to expand on and pinpoint what makes Twitter tick.
After all, the people of Twitter, or the Twiterati does drive enlightenment in unusual ways more often that not, and we could all do with a little bit of unusual enlightenment in our lives. (hoping the Illuminati doesn’t cancel me now)
Photos from Pexels