5 Twitter Mistakes to Avoid

Isaac Asimov rightly said “Change is the only constant.” In a world that thrives on eternal change, you can’t get stuck in the school of thought that worked in archaic times. With the dawn of social media, everyone is on the move constantly. Understandably, using social media to enhance your marketing efforts is helpful and common. One of the most popular methods of using marketing in social media is through Twitter. Marketing through Twitter can be exceedingly beneficial, but you must be willing to branch out and try new approaches to target new customers.

With so many B2B brands having their presence on Twitter, they are in a constant effort to reach more prospects. This calls them to adjust their marketing strategies in accordance with the requirements of the new age customers.

To market to the best of your abilities, avoid the following five Twitter mistakes:

1) Mass Following Instead of Targeted Following

You can integrate your sales process with social marketing when you set up targeted following for better engagement. You should have a clear reason to follow and connect with people on social channels. Then your social network shapes up as the useful metric which yields good result.

• Building thought leadership with engaging topics.
• Focusing on relevant Twitter chats and industry events.
• Engaging with your competitors.
• Following your followers of your competitors.
• Engaging with groups or associations where your target buyer spends time.

What businesses should do:

Don’t blindly go with the numbers – follows, mentions, retweets etc. Space your activity by following a few accounts on one day and increase the number on other days. Like you can do 10 on one day and 20 or 30 on another day. A thorough research should be the prerequisite for this activity.

2) Focusing Only on Influencers

Many businesses are very particular about identifying, following and engaging only with the influencers. They often see that the results are not in line with their expectations. It’s high time companies start realizing that creating a list of influences is easy and everyone in this business has one. As everyone is vying for a space to grab the influencer’s attention, you have to be a cut above the rest.

Gone are the days of liking/retweeting an influencer’s tweet to get mileage for your brand. You have to venture beyond that and talk with influencers and get to know more. So, keep the Twitter engagement in place and along with that venture beyond the ordinary.

What businesses should do:

Engage with your network in the right manner. The success depends on the influencer and his tweet or retweet about your brand. More the followers more will be the reach of your brand. Grow healthy conversations with your influencers and thank them when they do their share of promoting your business.

3) Using Low-quality Content

The 80/20 rule of content curation lays an interesting guideline for social sharing. Out of 10 articles you tweet about, keep two of yours and eight of others. This approach is based on the obsolete belief that content is omnipresent and you don’t need a bot to dig into it. Also when the content is not of high-quality, why to cling your brand to it. That being said, why are you wasting your social media efforts to drive traffic to others’ websites?

What businesses should do:

Great content garner great results. The major chunk of long-form content should be generated at your end. More share for the content gets you more traffic. The crux is to create good quality content and position it in a much better way.

4) Excessive Automation

Although marketing automation has its share of advantages from avoiding repetitive tasks to segmenting and targeting customers in an optimal way, overdoing it can kill the process. When it comes to social media, overusing automation may place a different perception of your brand among your target audience.

Be social to drive conversations on social media. To illustrate, many companies use automated tools to flood the Twitter users with canned responses. On one side, this presents a bad picture in front of the prospect and, secondly, it ceases an opportunity to strike a real engagement with people.

What businesses should do:

Be cautious when you use marketing automation to grow interactions on social media. When you are doing that ensure not to deliver them under the garb of personalized messages.

5) Using Traditional Twitter Marketing Metrics

It’s important to monitor the conventional social media metrics such as shares, retweets, favorites and mentions because they give insights into how properly you are using your social media. However, this information doesn’t provide the right measure for your social marketing ROI. A great social marketing strategy should improve brand awareness and generate interest about it across the users. It brings traffic to the website and initiates interactions. Ultimately, it grows conversions through workshop registrations, newsletter requests, case study sign-ups, etc.

What businesses should do:

Ensure that there are proper systems such as content downloads, email newsletter sign-ups, etc, in place to gauge conversions from social media marketing.

Brands have to realize that social marketing is a pivotal part in the company’s overall marketing strategies. This integrated supportive mechanism hinges on your branding initiatives to give a clear picture of ROI from social media.

The brands that care for and focus on social media will reap the harvest of growing customer interactions, and on the flip side, those who automate the whole social workflow may land on a shaky terrain.