How Building Product Manufacturers Can Engage Their Audience on Twitter

Twitter is a powerful platform with millions of engaged users every day. The latest number of daily active Twitter users globally is 396.5 million users. The challenge is how to harness Twitter’s powerful platform to attract and engage your audience from live events to product launches.

Your Brand on Twitter

Even if your brand is already on Twitter, it’s always good to audit and edit where needed and make necessary changes. Ensuring that your brand is reflected accurately, personably and consistently. If your brand is not on Twitter yet, it’s time to join the conversations!

Begin with your handle and username. The handle is your brand name and does not change. Your username is malleable which can change to reflect the season, sale or event, for instance.

Use your logo for the profile picture. Assure that it fits well in the space and meets the recommended dimensions of 400×400 pixels.

Like your username, the header image can change with what your brand would like to spotlight at the time. Use your header to highlight the launch of a new product, involvement in a trade show, or the announcement of good news related to your brand.

Create a profile with a strong story of what your brand is about. Aim to make it informative, positive, and memorable, adding hashtags to make finding your brand easy for users searching for your products. Include a link to your website, contact information and your location(s).

Lastly, once you start tweeting, “pin” a tweet. It may be a tweet about your bestselling building products and services, or something that is currently happening like a trade show or product launch, or an awards competition your brand is involved with for example.

Plan Ahead

Once you have set up the account it is time to set your strategy. Things to consider such as what will the voice of your brand sound like, how often will you tweet, and what time of day should you post to reach the most people?

According to Twitter for business you can use the following to schedule your tweets depending on who your audience is:

• Between 8–10 AM and 6–9 PM (in correlation with commuter schedules) on weekdays
• Around noon or between 5–6 PM on any day of the week
• For B2C companies, the best days to tweet are weekends
• For B2B companies, the best days to tweet are weekdays

You can schedule your posts easily with one of the many social media posting/scheduling tools. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, there is a “Top 30” but here, for expediency, we have listed the top 5:

1. Brandwatch
2. Loomly
3. Sendible
4. Napoleon Cat
5. Agora Pulse
   

*Special mentions in the list of 30 are Hootsuite, a more popular tool, which comes in 6th, Sprout Social another widely used posting tool coming in 13th, and finally TweetDeck at number 15.

Goals

Engaging your audience on Twitter may be a goal in and of itself but understanding what the ultimate goals are is key. Is your brand looking for an increase in brand awareness, website traffic, to discover the community sentiment around your brand, and lead generation/conversions? Scrutinizing your brand’s engagement numbers on Twitter can also be a measurement of your goals.

According to Hubspot, the following engagement metrics can reflect your goals:

Increased brand awareness

• Measured by follower count.
• Increased brand sentiment is a newer metric tracked by using surveys to measure an audience’s feelings about a brand.
• This can also be measured by analyzing keywords and common themes in messages with your brand.

Increased brand engagement

• Measured by likes, Retweets, replies, and shares.
• Increased community engagement
• Measured by mentions and tags.

Increased traffic

• Either to your site or specific landing or product pages.

Lead Generation

• Measured by captured email addresses or content downloads directly from Twitter.

High conversion rate

• Measured by sales directly from Twitter.

Successful customer support

• Measured by customer satisfaction scores and customer experience.

Content Strategy

Keep your message concise, speaking in the same voice you want to use throughout your timeline. Limit hashtags (#) to 1-2 per tweet otherwise it starts to look chaotic and the message gets lost (there is such a thing as too many #hashtags). Also, think about using a “template” so the tweets are easy to compose and sound and look consistent.

If you want your audience to take an action, make that call to action clear and easy. Stay away from all caps- it comes off in a text-based tweet like you may be yelling. If you want to convey an emotion, use an emoji or two. 😊 Retweet positive content that includes direct links to your website and/ or blogs other people have shared.

Twitter is also known as a platform audiences turn to when they have an issue with a product or service. Address these issues immediately, positively, and humbly. Sometimes it helps to use humor when applicable. When your audience sees that you are addressing problems personally it turns what could be a negative unhappy event into a positive, happy customer who feels heard. It’s a win-win!

Every picture tells a story- adding media such as images, video and GIFs to a tweet can help it stand out. Avoid text-heavy images, keep videos under 15 seconds, and always use captions when possible. Make the image clickable to drive traffic to your site or use a CTA button. A post including media demonstrating your product in action is so many times more powerful than text from your brand *telling* the audience what your product can do. Using media is known to increase engagement between brands and their audience.

Coming to You Live!

According to Twitter, live tweeting during events helps an audience get excited about your products and your brand. It’s important to live tweet throughout an event- not necessarily constantly.

• Plan and begin to use the event hashtags in tweets. This will align your brand with the event.
• Have all your media ready to go on the day/s of the event. You don’t want to miss an opportunity while you search for the perfect video or image of your product/service.
• Begin to engage your audience before the event with polls and questions- asking if they’ll be there and what they are most excited about seeing, learning, and experiencing at the event.
• During the event use the event hashtags along with your brand’s hashtags, images, and video to drive searches and engagement. Make sure you engage with your audience- retweeting, liking, and replying.

Once the event is over make sure to go back and follow up with any questions or tweets you may have missed. Use Twitter analytics to find out what tweets were most popular and drove engagement. These can be helpful to reuse for future organic campaigns.

Host a Chat

Your brand can host a chat daily, weekly, or monthly. For example, #kbtribechat asks questions and then invites their audience to join the conversation at a certain date/time.

To host a Twitter Chat first choose a topic relevant to your brand. Set a time and date for the chat to occur and create a hashtag for the chat. You can share about the chat with your audience in tweets, on your website, in your Twitter headline, or in a pinned tweet.  

Twitter Safety

To stay in good standing and get your tweets seen you need to follow the rules! Twitter has general safety rules for posting that we have listed here:
• No automated account following or unfollowing is allowed
• Repeatedly posting duplicate or unsolicited replies will get flagged as spam
• Tagging unrelated Tweets with trending topics can result in account suspension
• All Tweets that include advertisements must be labeled as “Promoted”
• Organic, non-promoted Tweets including paid product placements, endorsements, and advertisements must be labeled as “Paid Partnerships”
• Posting duplicate links to flood a search result may lead to suspension

Get Verified

Lastly, you can always apply to Twitter to be “verified”. The coveted blue check mark is a way to show your audience that you are the real deal!

There are so many ways to use Twitter for organic growth in your social media strategy.  If you would like help setting up a social media strategy, and finding your unique audience, why not book a Discovery Call with the GreenHouse team! With our extensive social media experience, we can help you improve your search results for your social media pages. Contact us to learn more!