Madalyn Sklar

Using Twitter to Grow Your Brand’s Influence

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Over the years, Twitter has consistently released new features and functionality that help users reach more people and grow their reach. We’ve seen hashtags become ingrained in our life, Twitter chats take off, threads becoming trendy, Spaces smashing Clubhouse—I could go on. This week, we invited social media consultant, Dhariano Lozano, to talk about how you can grow your brand’s influence using Twitter. Here’s a summary of our chat.

Guest: Dhariana Lozano
Topic: Using Twitter to grow your brand’s influence
Format: Eight questions directed at the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

The #TwitterSmarter chat is sponsored by Ahrefs.

Q1: How can participating in Twitter chats and Spaces help grow your influence?

Both Twitter chats and Spaces bring together people who share similar interests. Twitter’s an excellent platform for you to showcase your expertise, share your knowledge, and earn the community’s trust as a credible voice. It also enables you to meet new people and share your message with newer audiences.

Big bonus: Both Spaces and chats are a perfectly adequate alternative for those who aren’t comfortable being on video—which is still one of the most effective ways to catapult your reach and influence.

As Beth emphasized, contributing in chats and Spaces allows other people to notice you and evaluate who you are as a person. The more constantly you show up, the more they’ll recall you.

Q2: When should you think about hosting your own Twitter chat and/or Spaces?

When you realize that no one’s talking about a topic you want to talk about, that’s when you should consider doing it yourself. Similarly, when you know that you can offer a wildly different perspective on a topic that others talk about, you should consider hosting.

Chats and Spaces are also good ways to engage with your community and grow your influence. It’ll come in handy when you host or sponsor an event, and you need to rally potential attendees and interested audiences together in one place.

All that said, though, it’s also important to know when to start a chat and when to start a space. As Lori mentioned, running a Twitter chat takes a lot of effort, regardless of how frequently you do it. Consider if you can dedicate the time and effort required to do it consistently and successfully—if you don’t think you have the capacity, don’t start a chat. Head over to Spaces instead—effort-wise, it’s far more manageable.

Q3: What are some ways to use Twitter Spaces for marketing your business?

What you do with Twitter Spaces will vary based on your business and industry. However, our guest shared some ideas that many businesses can implement, including hosting periodic educational discussions, interviewing thought leaders in your industry, featuring speakers from an upcoming event, inviting influencers to take over your space for a while, or promoting other forms of content you put out, such as your newsletter or podcasts.

Try any or all of these ideas. You might even do something different entirely like Madalyn does with the Twitter after-chat on Spaces. If you haven’t heard of it yet—it’s a Twitter Space running every Thursday at 5 pm ET as a continuation of the #TwitterSmarter chat. It’s a great way to join the conversation, especially if you missed the Twitter chat at 1 pm ET.

Alyx suggested using Twitter Spaces as an extension to your tweets. Because you’re not limited by characters or duration, you can leverage this audio delivery platform to engage in deep conversations and forge strong connections with your audience. And because it’s all real-time and you hear the other person’s body language through their tone, you can resonate with them easily.

Q4: What are some ways to incorporate your brand style and voice in your tweets?

There are a range of things you can do to infuse your brand voice in your tweets. Start by using your brand colors in your GIFs, videos, banner images, and profile. Then expand on this by choosing what kind of topics you’ll comment on as a brand—apart from matters that directly relate to your business. What you tweet about can say a lot about who you are as a brand and what you care for.

If it’s relevant to your brand, incorporate emojis in your tweets—choose which emojis you’ll use in your communications and which ones you definitely won’t use. Setting up this guideline early on helps transfer the brand’s voice over to new people who’ll join your business in future.

As our friends from VirtuDesk pointed out, it’s also helpful to design templates for any creative material you use on Twitter. This will ensure that you never go off-brand.

Q5: What are the benefits of having a branded hashtag?

The biggest benefit of having a branded hashtag is that it becomes a database your community can rely on. The best example of this is, of course, our own #TwitterSmarter. Just click on it and you’ll find heaps of tweets and comments from professionals talking about Twitter, sharing Twitter facts and features, and ways to get the most out of this platform.

As Lance illustrated, having a branded hashtag is also a big differentiating factor. It makes your brand stand out from the rest of the brands in your industry and people who tweet about similar things. A branded hashtag will also act as a tag line that showcases what you stand for as a brand.

Q6: Share some common hashtag mistakes.

The most common mistake, according to Dhariana is using popular and trending hashtags just for the sake of it. You might think they’ll help you get more impressions, but if the hashtag itself isn’t closely relevant to your brand, then it won’t get you far.

Another mistake is hashtagging every word, without pausing to think whether it’ll really help bolster your reach. For example, you’ve probably seen people adding the hash sign in front of random words like “the” or “about.” Because these hashtags neither serve a specific function nor related the topic of your tweet, it’s best to avoid using them.

Dhariana also suggested expanding your hashtags. Not doing so will eventually stagnate your reach because only those in your community will actively use them. Instead, if you look at newer hashtags to incorporate in your Twitter strategy, you’ll consistently reach newer audiences each time you tweet.

Sarah pointed out a few more common mistakes, including not using CamelCase. This is important for accessibility, because screen readers often struggle to read out hashtags that aren’t clearly separated. For instance, the hashtag, #DoNotHashtagThisWay is easier to discern than #donothashtagthisway.

Other mistakes Sarah pointed out include, using too many hashtags (2 is ideal, according to Twitter), using hashtags that aren’t relevant to your brand, and not leveraging hyper-local hashtags.

Q7: What are some effective ways to use the Pin Tweet feature?

One of the most effective ways to use the Pinned Tweet feature is to convey your most important content and your latest campaigns.

Many people also use the pinned tweet as an extension of their bio, adding a video about themselves or a written piece of content that explains what they do. It can also be the start of a threaded conversation about something that matters to you.

Q8: How often should you audit your Twitter account, and how?

Auditing your Twitter profile regularly is crucial for keeping it up-to-date.

How often you audit your account can vary based on your account’s size and what you’re looking for. For example, some accounts do a mini audit every fortnight to check if their latest content has performed well. They might do a bigger audit each month, and a comprehensive analysis every quarter.

When you do audit your profile, look at ways to change things up, as our guest suggested. Use this opportunity to try experimenting with your bio’s messaging, using your header image in creative ways, or even changing the colour scheme of your profile. Unless you try, you’ll never know what change might work in your favor.

If you’re keen to learn more about auditing your profile and ways to keep it relevant, join Madalyn, Dhariana, and George every Saturday at 1 pm ET for their #TwitterAudits Space. They’ll review listeners’ bios live and suggest ways to enhance them.

Well folks, that’s all from me this week. Thanks a lot for reading through and for more great insights from our chat with Dhariana, have a look at this Twitter Moment that Joana put together for us. If you think this summary is pretty good, you’ll love the real-time chat. Join us every Thursday at 1pm ET on #TwitterSmarter. We also hang out on Twitter Spaces at 5pm ET to continue our chat. Catch you there!

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About me, Narmadhaa:

I write all the things—marketing stuff for the bills; haiku and short stories for the soul. A social media enthusiast, I hang out with the #TwitterSmarter chat crew, and am always happy to take on writing gigs.

Say hello: The Opinionated Copywriter | LinkedIn | Twitter

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