Madalyn Sklar

Converting Twitter Into a Growth Accelerator For Your Business

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Most marketers sign up for Twitter because they want to use it as a way to grow their brand and reach new audiences. Twitter, as a platform, is perfect for that. However, it’s also extremely easy to get distracted and lost on Twitter. You could spend hours (and eventually months) on Twitter just having fun and solving momentary issues without any long-term growth. That’s why, this week on #TwitterSmarter, we invited strategy hacker, Troy Sandidge, to talk about how brands can use Twitter to accelerate their growth. Here’s a summary of our chat.

Guest: Troy Sandidge
Topic: Converting Twitter into a growth accelerator for your business
Format: Eight questions directed at the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

Q1: Is Twitter still relevant for growing businesses in 2022?

Over the last few years, Twitter has become increasingly relevant for growing businesses. New features and functionality such as Spaces, Community, and Twitter Blue, along with current monetization trends have made Twitter an attractive platform for businesses keen to expand their reach.

As our guest pointed out, Twitter’s biggest selling point is that it caters to a broad range of business areas—from search engine optimization, to branding, press coverage, and customer support.

On our Twitter chats, we often talk about the importance of being where your audience is. If your audience doesn’t use Twitter, then you may not have a big use of this platform, as Kaz put it nicely. If Twitter isn’t the most popular platform amongst your target audience, your goals for Twitter will be different from someone whose audience uses Twitter primarily. While they try to keep their existing audience engaged, your focus may be on building awareness and acquiring new leads.

Q2: How can you use Twitter to amplify your brand outside Twitter?

Use tweets to encourage people to connect with you outside of Twitter. These could be links to your livestreams, your YouTube channel, your LinkedIn profile, or even your email.

The first step in amplifying your brand outside Twitter is to amplify your brand within Twitter. As your community’s trust in your content grows stronger, you’ll become a more credible social figure. For example, if your brand becomes the go-to for information about your industry when someone looks up something about your industry on search engines, your Twitter profile will show up, followed closely by your website and other social channels.

Use your profile descriptions, hashtags, extended display name, participation on Twitter Communities, and Spaces as ways of establishing who you are as a brand. The stronger your presence as a brand, the stronger your brand will be outside of Twitter as well.

Q3: Share some strategies to convert Twitter into a sales pipeline.

Troy shared an easy process you can follow. After hosting a Spaces conversation, create a Twitter List of all those who participated in that conversation. Then send them all a message, or connect on other channels like LinkedIn and Instagram so you can initiate a personal conversation. Continue to engage with them and develop your relationship.

Twitter enables you to use the platform as a bridge to another platform or mode of communication. Troy calls this the slingshot strategy. He also pointed out that this is particularly helpful for small and marginalized businesses that may not have the same success with other social channels like LinkedIn.

Building a community and developing long-term relationships is crucial on Twitter. However, as our guest pointed out, you need to do all those and more if you want to convert your Twitter presence into a sales pipeline. Remember that community engagement is a part of your sales process—it’s at the top of your funnel where you’re building awareness and expanding reach, but you also have to nudge your prospects through the pipeline, and convert those Twitter replies and engagements into more goal-orientated discussions.

Q4: How can you leverage Twitter as a business networking tool?

As Madalyn pointed out, don’t wait for others to engage with you first. There are a lot of people on Twitter, and if you wait for someone to come to you, you might be waiting a long time. Be proactive, find communities you resonate with, and participate in conversations, whether on Twitter chats or Spaces.

Use Twitter Spaces to your benefit! The nature of audio-only functionality is ideal to build rapport and make instant connections with like-minded people.

There are so many other ways to engage with people and grow your network. Along with Spaces, use your tweets and other forms of content to share feedback with others and gather feedback on your brand, talk to other brands about how your team works and learn from them, discuss recruitment efforts, use polls to assess perspectives, and more.

Q5: How can small businesses use Twitter to access influential business leaders/groups?

Use Twitter as a starting point to build relationships with industry leaders. You can then continue your discussion on other platforms like LinkedIn, or engage with them on Twitter on an ongoing basis. Whichever you’re comfortable with, prioritize continuity of conversation.

If you decide to stay on Twitter, leverage Twitter’s extensive social listening tools to find out more about what your contacts care about—both on a personal level and a business level. Knowing these details will help you connect with them almost instantaneously—perhaps you both support the same soccer club or have the same tailor. Additionally, you can also use the exponential growth of the creator trend. Create useful content more frequently, tag relevant leaders, and initiate conversations.

Another great way to connect with influencers and business leaders in your industry is to attend Spaces conversations and Twitter chats, as Alyx pointed out. Many leaders pop in and out of these live events and it’s a great opportunity to engage with such leaders.

Q6: What are some do’s and don’ts about driving people from Twitter to your website?

Troy recommended being transparent about the link you share and giving people a clear context of what you’re sharing and the motivation to click through. He also suggested experimenting with different types of landing pages and Twitter Cards.

As for what to avoid, Troy emphasized not to be a broadcaster—where you’re constantly talking at your audience rather than having a two-way conversation. He also strongly advised against tagging people on irrelevant tweets and spamming them with too many links.

Shruti also pointed out the value of being genuinely helpful on Twitter and doing so consistently. It’s important to establish yourself as a credible brand so that people will be willing and keen to click through the links you share.

Q7: How can you use Twitter to boost your business’s growth strategy?

Troy told us about the DART method—be direct, authentic, resourceful, and tactical. When you share a link, expecting people to click through and perform an action elsewhere, you have to be sure that the page they’re landing on has the necessary information they need to convert. That’s what it means to be tactical—there’s no point in sharing a great tweet if you don’t have the systems in the backend to support your efforts.

Check out this post Troy shared on Instagram to learn more about the DART methodology and how to execute it.

Dave also talked about the importance of chatting with people. Know your audience and what they expect from you, and then jump in on threads and discussions with them. The more actively engage with your audience, the more you’ll reach newer people who hear about you from others. Building relationships is one of the simplest things you can do on social media, but it’s also one of the most effective ways to grow.

Q8: How long do you have to create content for Twitter before you can see your brand grow?

Be careful how you define growth. As our guest pointed out, growth and success are subjective. Instead of chasing after vanity metrics, focus on increasing the number of engagements you get and the number of people you continue to chat with.

Building relationships and participating in meaningful; conversations are essential for your brand’s growth. That’s the essence of community building. At the same time, be realistic. A strong community will only help you so much if you don’t have regular conversions. At the end of the day, if you’re in business you need to make money to sustain yourself. Creating and sharing content is just one part of a much bigger picture—remember to find the balance between creating content, engaging with your community, nurturing your leads, converting, and retaining 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 Troy, have a look at this Twitter Moment 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 so I can pay the bills; haiku and short stories so I feel wholesome. 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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