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Can Twitter be used by Local and Small businesses to gain new opportunities and bring in new business?
Let’s discuss this.
Of the 5 major social media platforms businesses can use…Twitter is the smallest. There are only 48.3 million people that use Twitter in the United States. It is only about 15% of the population.
That being said…Twitter still has its uses. You will need to understand your target audience and if they use such accounts. At the end of the day, Google will still reward you for having an account and posting to it.
Twitter is a bit different from other social media platforms…but not really. Let me explain. They give you a couple of options. The Top post feed or the Latest post feed.
The latest post feed show’s people the posts from their followers and the Top post feed uses the algorithm to give you what it thinks you want to see.
Twitter is a social networking application. The idea behind any of these applications is to create an environment in which people can visit to interact with other people that are not right in front of you.
This interaction can be on many different levels…but all of them emotional. A post is going to make you cry, laugh, get angry, want to throw your phone, etc. This type of engagement is what makes any and all social networking applications work. Twitter is no different.
The signals they use for their algorithm are:
Recency
Relevance
Engagement
Rich Media
As you can see from our previous articles each of these algorithms work on many of the same principles. I wouldn’t be surprised if the developers swap code to get each of these applications working. It might be a sacreligious statement, but most likely true.
That being said, let’s break these down further.
Recency – Pretty cut and dry. From the point a user opens the application, how long ago did the post happen. The closer to the time the higher it will show in the feed.
Relevance – This is based on the words in the tweet (keywords). It will gage those words based on similar type words a user has engaged with previously.
Engagement – As far as engagement is concerned on Twitter you will be looking at retweets, clicks, impressions and favorites a tweet actually gets.
All of this will be compared to other tweets the users has engaged with in the past.
Rich Media – This is based on the type of media used in the tweet (polls, video, gifs and pictures. Also how much a user engages with each type of media.
Honorable mentions go to the amount of twitter followers an account has and the location of the account.
We’ll be honest. Twitter is our least favorite social application. It has just enough users to get traction with some demographics in the society that people still post on it, but not enough to give your full attention.
To use this application for business marketing you will need to know your target audience very well. If they fit the demographics of Twitter, by all means use it to generate business.
We would not recommend putting all your eggs in this one basket. I would make content for the other applications and just throw it up on twitter and watch the analytics and see what bites.
Then start A/B testing similar content within Twitter until you have consistent interaction.
I hope this article was helpful. Follow us on any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog to continue to get articles such as this one.
