How startups can use Twitter marketing to brand, sell, and grow

A Twitter marketing campaign can be essential to a startup's success. It can help businesses brand themselves and sell their products and services to a loyal and dedicated audience.

It's worth noting that learning how to use Twitter for marketing takes time and energy, but with the right tools and Twitter marketing tips under your belt, you can guarantee your startup's success. However, getting acquainted with the platform's upsides and downsides before getting started is crucial, as promoting a business through Twitter may not be right for everyone.

Read on to find out how you can use the site to your benefit, and determine whether it's right for your business.

Understand the cons

With 330 million active monthly users and 500 million tweets sent per day, Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms on the planet. And while this puts your business in front of a significant amount of potential customers, it also makes it difficult to stand out amongst competitors creating tons of content every day.

You need to realize that you won't find success overnight on the site. "It's a long game," says Levi Olmstead, director of marketing at 2nd Kitchen, "You need to dedicate energy and effort to making Twitter worthwhile or expect to be disappointed."

According to Olmstead, another con is that Twitter has poor analytic features, and you'll need to utilize a third-party tool if you want to analyze how your campaigns performed.

Make the most of its pros

In terms of pros, Twitter is a great place to have personal and meaningful interactions with audiences, says Noah Riggs, marketing coordinator for DollarSprout. "People feel privileged when they get a follow back or get to talk to a company that means something to them. Even a retweet or a like can go a long way."

Another pro is that Twitter users are not mindlessly logging on; they are typically dedicated, diehard fans of the site, which means that you'll likely have an active fan base. "The daily active users are not on [the platform] casually," said Jason Thibault, owner, and operator at Massive Kontent. "They dive headfirst into the newsfeed firehose."

Keep in mind that if you are unable to post and interact with your social media followers on a frequent basis, if you don't have the time to commit to Twitter marketing long term, or you don't want to invest in third-party tools, then the platform may not be the best place to promote your business.

Invest in the right tools

Now that you know the pros and cons of Twitter and have made a decision on whether or not the site is right for you, you can implement some Twitter marketing tips from the experts when you run your next campaign.

Investing in the right tools should be your first step. According to Thibault, the best tools for Twitter include Followerwonk, Hootsuite, and the Twitter Analytics dashboard. Followerwonk lets you analyze your followers and see who they are, where they live and when they tweet, while Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts, monitor all your brand mentions, and build streams on one dashboard. Twitter Analytics gives you the chance to see your top tweet and mention, as well as any new followers you gained throughout the month.

Another helpful tool for Twitter marketing is Twitter Promote Mode, says Beth Kearsley, operations assistant at Tao Digital Marketing. You can pay to promote your tweets every day, which could help you reach new users.

Use the search bar

A simple but effective way to reach users through Twitter marketing is the search bar. According to Riggs, you can search for a term related to your business and then interact with people tweeting about it.

He explains that, as an example, if you started a new investment app, you could search for "how to invest" and talk to people who have asked this question. "You can eventually suggest your product in a meaningful way and more than likely convert."

Incorporate hashtags into your tweets

Twitter showcases the top news and conversations of the day through hashtags. According to Thibault, you should utilize one or two hashtags in a tweet in order to get in on the conversation.

"You could use one evergreen hashtag and one that's trending that day and get the best of both worlds," he says.

The key to success

Let it sink in: Twitter marketing requires long-term dedication and patience. You need to take the time to build your following by being "honest, kind, and [projecting] the personality of your business/brand," says Kearsley.

Even if you're tempted to buy followers, don't do it. They tend to be fake, they don't engage with your brand, and Twitter will usually filter them out, Kearsley explains. "You want your followers to be customers, stakeholders, or people that actually like your brand. These are the users that will engage with your content."

In other words, you need to be patient, and success will follow.