Written by ContentPowered.com
Your Twitter profile is important for business, if you’re using it – or trying to, that is. Like any other marketing channel, you have two goals; make it as effective and optimized as possible, and make it look organic. You want to streamline every aspect of your profile to maximize clicks and conversion, but you don’t want your profile to look like it’s been created with marketing in mind. Users appreciation the wholesome, the natural, the compelling. They don’t want your banner image to be a billboard and your featured post to be a tagline.
There are some things you can adjust and some things you can’t. You can’t change your @username without necessitating a large rebranding campaign. You may have a difficult time changing your voice in a natural manner. You can easily change the text and images in your profile. How can you optimize your business profile?
1. Use Your Banner Photo Creatively
When Twitter first updated the layout of their profiles, the biggest change was the huge image stretched across the top of the screen. It’s no longer partially blocked by your other information, aside from your profile picture, and it’s significantly wider. It can support images up to 1500×500 in size. Other than dimensions, it’s actually very much like Facebook’s header images. This led many marketers to look at popular Facebook pages for header inspiration.
You can use your header image for a number of purposes. The general guidelines to keep in mind, however, are the same. Pick a high resolution image. Pick crisp colors that suit your brand in some way. Match your image to the image you want to portray.
Here are some more specific ideas:
- Make a collage of images, relating to an ongoing ad campaign, follower submissions or product categories.
- Show off the faces behind your business with a candid office photo.
- Show off a panoramic view of your physical location or a compelling local attraction.
- Integrate your image with other features to create a more seamless whole.
Perhaps the biggest bit of advice is to make sure you upload a new image to match the new dimensions. Using an old image, or leaving the header blank, makes it look as though you don’t care about your profile.
2. Optimize Your Pinned Tweet
You have room to pin a tweet to the top of your timeline, so it’s the first thing a user sees when they visit your profile. This doesn’t keep it showing up in your followers’ feeds, of course; it just shows publicly to those who visit your profile personally.
First of all, you’ll probably want to stay away from anything blatantly advertorial, in a bland call to action sense. A simple “buy our product!” tweet isn’t going to bring you any benefit. Instead, you should appeal to emotion, summarize your mission or make an important announcement.
- If you have an upcoming event or trade show, advertise it. The same goes if you’re showing up to one as a speaker or even as a guest; you can tell fans where to meet you.
- If you’re launching a new product, pin a tweet with a link to a place users can go for more details.
- If you don’t have an ongoing ad campaign or new event to advertise, dial back and pin one of your best historic tweets, as long as its content is evergreen. You don’t want to pin information for an expired deal, after all.
- If nothing else, pin an appeal to emotion. Pin something that will inspire your users or make them feel good about themselves. A humorous tweet, an inspirational quite or a quaint truism can brighten their day and make them feel better about your brand.
3. Fully Utilize Your Bio
Your bio is a great opportunity. For one thing, it’s indexed in search and shows up when your profile shows up in the search results. For another, it’s an opportunity for a quick, Twitter-sized bite of your brand condensed into a few short words. With only 160 characters, you don’t have a lot of room to work. On the other hand, you have more than a tweet, so it stands out.
One trick you can make use of is to include relevant non-branded hashtags in your profile. Relevant, of course, because they need to tie in to your products. Non-branded because it’s obvious as part of your bio that these are meant to describe your brand. General categories and interests are good here.
Don’t worry about including a link or location information in your bio; there are specific sections for those pieces of information. Likewise, you don’t necessarily need to include your brand name, because it shows up in your handle and username, and in your header image if you put it there.
4. Streamline Your Followed List
This doesn’t necessarily make users more likely to follow your profile, but it will allow you to get more use out of Twitter. First of all, try to maintain a low ratio of followed accounts to followers. You don’t want to look like you’re desperately following everyone in hopes that they follow you back.
Keep your followed list pruned down to relevant, important people in your industry. This does two things. First, anyone who decides to check out the list of people you follow will have an immediate sense that you’re attached to your industry and know who is who. Second, it makes sure that your own twitter feed is full of influential information from powerful people.
5. Optimize Your Content
How many images have you tweeted in the last week? How many videos? Chances are you need more of both. Tweets including images have as much as 150% of the engagement that purely textual tweets gain. Videos – and animated gifs to a lesser extent – offer the same sort of boost.
Images stand out and videos bring a moment to life. Both of these are good ways to position your brand as a provider of content that users want to see. What you share, precisely, varies from business to business. The media format, however, shouldn’t. Share multimedia and benefit.