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Since you’re reading this, you probably want to learn how to develop a marketing strategy and improve your performance on Twitter, get more followers, and become better at social media engagement. Wanting to improve how you’re doing in anything is half the battle, so good work on putting in the effort to try some new things to boost your productivity!
The beauty of Twitter as a social network is that anyone can set up a profile in a matter of minutes. With short character limits for the bio, there’s not a whole lot standing in the way of setting up a presence on Twitter, yet somehow it’s one of those social networks that many photographers and other creative professionals and even major businesses neglect. Most either don’t think it can drive traffic, sales, and new customers or they simply don’t understand how to gain traction on Twitter when it seems that everyone else already has a long-established presence.
Is there even a point in trying to develop a strategy and build a more engaged Twitter presence in 2022 and can a new kid on the block even get noticed in such a crowded space? Yes, absolutely. Although the political side of Twitter is what hits the news most often, that’s not the only thing the social network is about — there are plenty of photographers, artists, writers, and other creative pros using Twitter to promote their brand identities and plenty of folks who appreciate the content they produce and engage with them on the network. Every day about 500 million tweets are sent by more than 200 million users. With so much information overload, standing out in the crowd is legitimately tough, but it’s a worthwhile effort.
Most guides to Twitter marketing waste a bunch of time explaining how to register for a Twitter account. If you’ve managed to turn your computer/phone on and find this page on the internet, we think you can probably figure this part out without a detailed guide! What is worth mentioning is that you should fill out your entire profile: add a profile photo that represents how you want to be seen by the world, choose a good cover photo, and write a good (and very brief) bio that sums up who you are and what you offer. Don’t forget to add a link to your website! Your Twitter bio can contain clickable links as well, but don’t overdo it: I’d suggest up to one extra link in your bio, perhaps to another social media presence of yours like Instagram or a Facebook page.
Let’s take a few minutes to go over a few easy ways for you to get started on Twitter.
Twitter Engagement Tip #1: Interact More
If your goal is to get more engagement on your Twitter account, you’ll need to start the ball rolling by engaging with other Twitter accounts. Unless you’re ready to pay for Twitter ads, your best shot of getting noticed on the social network is to connect with other users by following, liking, retweeting, and commenting on their posts. Increase your visibility and soon you’ll find that more and more people visit your profile and engage with your content. Social media done properly is a give and take relationship — unless you’re already a huge celebrity, if you only try to extract value from it without putting anything in, your marketing efforts will fall short.
Make your interactions meaningful. If you want quality relationships and potential clients, be engaging. Ask questions, give advice, dish out compliments, and make use of the character limit — you won’t build relationships by just saying, “Nice picture.”
Twitter Engagement Tip #2: Post More Images
This one seems pretty obvious. After all, this is an article on how photographers can dominate Twitter and use it to drive traffic, sales, and bookings…but you’d be surprised by how many photographers simply post text-only links to their images posted on other websites. What!? We live in a visual world, and if you want to drive engagement, you need to cater to what people want to see: photos.
Posting a good photo isn’t enough to get people engaging with your Twitter account though. You’ll need to write a compelling caption that makes people want to click on the photo to view it larger, ask questions that encourage people to respond, and use hashtags to improve visibility. We’ll go over these other steps in more detail below. Remember: Only post your BEST images. Behind the scenes shots are fine too (and super popular), but when it comes to posting your finished images, stick to the best.
Twitter Engagement Tip #3: Add Context and Hook the Viewer
Are you going to spend more time looking at a Tweet that says, “I took this pic yesterday,” or one that says, “Would you look at this shot I got of a the snowstorm yesterday! ❄❄ 2 feet of snow later and this is all you can see of the road. Give it a like if you’re a winter lover! #winterstorm2022”
Have you ever watched some of the popular Youtube channels? You’ve probably noticed the typical script that goes something like, “Thanks for watching: be sure to hit like, comment, and subscribe!” — it can be a bit annoying to hear over and over, but there’s a reason they say it. Giving your viewers direction actually delivers results. If you don’t ask people to subscribe, most won’t. The same principles of marketing hold true when it comes to Twitter. You’ve got to consistently produce content that appeals to your followers, but you’ve also got to encourage them to perform desired actions.
Twitter Engagement Tip #4: Use Hashtags…But Not Too Many
Hashtags should be used to make sure your posts show up for popular search keywords. Hashtags should not be used for every word of your post. Twitter recommends using one to two relevant hashtags, and this is usually a good guideline…personally, I think three is ok too, especially if spread out throughout your Twitter post and not just stuck at the end in a lump of hashtag-excess. Too many hashtags and the message of your Twitter post will get lost in the clutter — too few, and you’ll be missing out on reaching more people. Put a little effort into seeing which hashtags are trending about your topic. Avoid using obscure hashtags that no one is searching for or engaging with.
Twitter Engagement Tip #5: Don’t Spam Your Audience
You know the person at that party who wouldn’t stop talking about themself? Don’t be that person. There’s often a fine line between self promotion and spam, but it’s a line you don’t want to cross. Since most photographers and other creatives are selling something (whether it’s your services, prints, or content) you probably don’t want to tweet links to your competitors, but there are still plenty of things you can tweet about and share. Remember to keep things professional and let your personality show – after all, you’re not a robot!
Feeling stuck and out of ideas about what to tweet about that aren’t just photos or links to your website? How about: inspirational quotes, helpful tips, or great local businesses. If you’re a wedding photographer, for instance, you might tweet the links to some of your favorite wedding venues (be sure to tag the venue in your post) — this sort of goodwill outreach is not only useful for your audience, but might earn you some points from the venue.
Twitter Engagement Tip #6: Know Your Target Audience
Opening up a winterwear store? You probably will have less success setting up shop in Miami Beach than in Minneapolis. Effective marketing, whatever your niche, is totally dependent upon understanding who your market is and what exactly you’re selling.
Part of any good business plan is being able to articulate what your business exists to do. What customer needs does it fulfill? Who currently buys your products and who do you want to buy your products? Using data and analytics, businesses should develop customer personas: these are fictional (but grounded in fact) profiles of typical customers and can really help marketers better understand who they need to reach.
Many photographers hoping to make an income selling prints or photography services make the big mistake of primarily connecting with and engaging with other photographers on social media, but it’s usually not other photographers who are going to buy your landscape prints or hire you to shoot newborn portraits or senior photos. Yes, it can be fun to network with your colleagues and get inspired by their work, but spend some time figuring out who your paid market is. Maybe it’s local parents, restaurant managers, pet owners, or lovers of fine art photography. Whoever they are, these are the people you need to focus the majority of your Twitter marketing efforts on.
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Twitter Engagement Tip #7: Post Consistently
Big companies understand that marketing should be a priority — they devote large budgets to promoting to potential customers and attempt to build brand saturation, where all of their target market is familiar with who they are and what they offer. Most photographers and other creatives don’t have multi-million dollar advertising budgets — many don’t have an advertising budget at all and that’s ok…you can still perform effective marketing even without big bucks. The key to using Twitter as a marketing platform is to be a consistent and frequent poster and engager. Twitter and social media in general is all about building relationships and relationships require constant cultivation to thrive.
Twitter Engagement Tip #8: Mention Others
Are there brands you’d like to work with? Social influencers whose opinions really matter? Tag these accounts in your (relevant) Twitter posts and you’ll increase your visibility. You won’t always get a retweet or interaction when you mention other accounts, but you will sometimes — in this numbers driven space, sometimes is a pretty important metric!
If you’re tagging other accounts in your Twitter posts, go a step further and engage with their Twitter posts. Show that you aren’t a one dimensional self-promoter and actually interact with the Twitter community.
Twitter Engagement Tip #9: Utilize Twitter Analytics
Instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping your Twitter marketing efforts pay off, there is a data-driven way to see your performance metrics right at your fingertips. Twitter analytics allows you to see how many views, retweets, likes, and replies every Tweet you make gets and how your daily performance compares with the previous days in a 28 day period. Additionally, the audience insights page provides demographic information about your Twitter audience.
While the analytics based upon hard numbers are especially useful, I take the demographic information with a grain of salt. Twitter builds a marketing profile of each of its user’s inferred interests based upon their interactions on the site and with Twitter partners, and some of these profiles are far more accurate than others. You can take a look at what Twitter thinks your interests are here.
Twitter Engagement Tip #10: Post at the Right Time
If you feel especially productive at midnight, I’m sure a lot of us can relate to that…but perhaps it’s not the best time for tweeting. Utilize the Twitter Analytics tools to figure out when your most productive tweeting time is. For some niches, it might be on Sundays at 2PM while other users might find their tweets perform best on Monday evenings around 6PM.
There’s no one-size-fits-all guideline for when to post: this is where analytics data and your customer persona will come into play. When is this customer checking Twitter and engaging with your posts? If it’s a business’s marketing manager it might be one answer. If it’s a pet owner who logs onto twitter on the weekend or after work, it might be a completely different answer. Tweak your posting times accordingly, and when you find out what content and timing resonates best, try to duplicate that success.
Twitter Engagement Tip #11: Optimize Your Time on Twitter
I’m a big believer in the usefulness of Twitter as a marketing platform, but I also understand that for many people it can become a big time-drain. If you’re spending all day on Twitter (or any other social network) hoping to get fast results, you’re doing it wrong. Business success is built around order and organization, so put together a social media strategy and schedule for yourself. Consider devoting a short time slot of each day to Twitter for engaging with other users. Set specific goals for your time so that you’re not wandering aimlessly.
To most effectively optimize your time and marketing efforts, schedule your Twitter posts in advance. Several services and apps provide Twitter post-scheduling: my personal favorites are TweetDeck and Buffer.
TweetDeck is a social media dashboard owned by Twitter that allows you to optimize your time on the network by managing multiple accounts at once (useful if you run a personal and business Twitter account), seeing trending topics, brand mentions, and scheduling posts. It’s a handy way to plan out your posts for the next several days, scheduling them to post at your picked times and freeing up plenty of time that you’d otherwise spend returning to Twitter over and over to post everything directly.
Buffer is a social media management platform which provides the ability to schedule posts on multiple social networks, making it a one stop shop for productivity. Their free plan allows users to connect up to three social networks and schedule up to ten posts in advance, while the pro plan lets you connect up to 8 networks, scheduling up to 100 posts ahead of time. You can tweak the content that’s posted to each to provide the best audience experience. After all, if someone follows both your Twitter and Facebook page, they don’t want to see the exact same content posted to both — keep your content on each network fresh and unique.
How often should you post on Twitter?
This is a tricky question, but like all tricky questions asked on the internet, you can be sure that plenty of people (including many reputable sources) have given wildly conflicting answers. There are sources that say you should post on Twitter 6-7 times a day. But…there are also lots of sources that say 3-5, 8, 10, 14, 15, etc…. How do you know who to believe?
When it comes to marketing, and especially social media marketing, there truly is no one-size-fits-all approach that works perfectly. Maybe all of the experts are right — but only for their particular niche, and when it comes to their particular followers. I shoot for about 5-10 tweets each day and I also recycle posts. Twitter has a short memory — your post will only remain visible for a really brief window of time, so what shows up for your morning viewers will be long since buried for your evening viewers. If you’re only sharing each piece of content once, you’re missing out on LOTS of views.
How to post the same content on Twitter multiple times
Post recycling is important! A lot of social marketers make the critical error of only sharing a link or photo once, thinking, “Mission accomplished!” — one post is definitely not mission accomplished. If you look at Twitter analytics, you’ll see that even your highest performing posts typically only reach a small percentage of your total follower count. Because everyone is on Twitter at different times, you’ll need to re-post your content at different times to ensure that the most people see it.
What you don’t want to do is regurgitate the same text over and over. Create different versions of the same content. Here are six sample Tweets I’ll use to promote this article on Twitter:
- Wasting your time on Twitter without results? Here are my effective marketing strategies to boost engagement. #marketing
- 11 proven steps to stand out as a photographer on Twitter #MarketingOnline #photography
- How to boost your Twitter engagement and drive clients without spending all day staring at your computer. #photographybusiness #businesstips
- Want more Twitter followers that engage with your posts? Here’s how to do it the right way. (Hint: you don’t need to buy them!) #entrepreneurmindset
- Can Twitter drive #photography clients? You bet! Here are the tools and skills you need to improve your presence #socialmarketing
- Improve your Twitter skills with these 11 tips that will have your engagement skyrocketing #socialmedia #photographybusiness
Want to go deeper down the rabbit hole of social media marketing? Be sure to visit our guide to using social media effectively and Instagram tips for photographers. For an even more comprehensive look at digital and social media marketing, check out these great books on Amazon:
500 Social Media Marketing Tips: Essential Advice, Hints and Strategy for Business: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and More! by Andrew Macarthy
Social Media Marketing Workbook: How to Use Social Media for Business by Jason McDonald
One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days by Brendan Kane
Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media by Brittany Hennessy
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