With social media becoming an ever more integral element to your digital marketing strategy, your Twitter profile may be the first point of contact a prospect has with your brand, so you need to create a great first impression.
Your Twitter profile will help you to build trust with your customers and is a space where you can showcase your brand, get involved in the community surrounding it, and convert visitors into loyal customers.
In order to create a great first impression and start engaging with prospects, you firstly need to make sure your Twitter profile is fully optimised. This post will examine how you can optimise your profile to help you fully utilise the platform’s potential.
Handle
Your Twitter handle is your username and is how you will be identified on the platform by others. Your handle, therefore, needs to be recognisable, simple, and memorable. It also needs to be short, as you have just 15 characters to impress.
Your handle will most likely be your company name, but if this is taken you will have to be creative. When deciding your username, think about what your target audience and other users would search for to find you. It will also help your audience if this is kept consistent with your other social profiles.
Profile Image
Your profile picture is the image associated with your username and appears next to each of your tweets and at the top of your profile. It needs to be a reflection of who you are as a brand, so your company logo will be very effective as your profile image.
It should be sized 400px x 400px to ensure that it is high-quality and attractive. Make sure it is consistent with your branding across your marketing material and other social profiles. If you have a rebrand, your profile picture needs to be updated too.
Header Image
Your header picture is the image which appears at the top of your Twitter profile. We recommend sizing it to 1500px x 421px so that it is a high-resolution photo and your profile looks professional. Make this image eye-catching and brightly coloured, but make sure important information isn’t covered by your profile picture.
Choose an image that fits with your brand theme and colours and best represents you. You could use this space to give a behind-the-scenes peek into your business or showcase new deals or products, but be sure to update this with new offers.
Bio
Your bio is a short description that appears in your profile and characterises your persona on Twitter. You need to describe your whole business in just 160 characters, so keep it short, succinct, memorable, and clear. Think of this as a short elevator pitch that outlines what you do, your brand’s message, and your key services. Think: why would someone follow you?
Use relevant keywords and the terms you want to be found for to optimise for search and make sure you are found by prospects and fans. Update your bio if you change your services or have a new focus or message. You can also add links, mentions, emoticons and hashtags to help you stand out, but make sure they fit naturally and don’t make it difficult to read by disrupting the flow.
Link
Underneath your bio, you can add a more specific URL that users can follow to find out more about you. You could link to your site or point to a new blog post or a new deal or product you want to direct users to.
You could be more strategic and create a Twitter-specific landing page with specific information that you want your Twitter users to see. You should also make this link trackable using bit.ly so you know who visits this page through Twitter and can assess how successful your Twitter strategy is.
Location
Add a location to your Twitter profile to let users know where your business is based. Add the geographical location that best applies to your business. In order to appear in local search results, your location should be where your customers and target audience is.
If you are located on the outskirts of a city and your target audience is based in the city centre, add the city centre location. If you are a digital business and don’t have a physical location, your location should be where your main audience and customers are. Whether this is global, local, national or international, be where your customers are.
Tweet
Next, you need to make your profile look active or anyone clicking on your profile will turn away. Populate your Twitter profile and start posting content that is relevant, quality, and useful to your audience. Use visual content to fill your media gallery such as images, videos, photos and GIFs, as tweets with photos get 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets.
Think carefully about how social media fits in with your content strategy to determine what type of content you will post. This could be curated content, company updates, blog posts, images, videos, questions and queries from customers, and links from other sources. Research what competitors and influencers are posting to get some ideas and get creative.
Pinned Tweets
Twitter is a very fast-paced platform. Tweets only have around 18 minutes to impress before they are buried to the depths of your timeline. However, you can pin a tweet to the top of your profile to keep it visible so that it is not buried by the constant flow of tweets.
This pinned tweet will also be the first tweet your audience sees, so make it stand out and create a good impression. This could be a deal, update, announcement, new blog post, or product you wish to highlight and draw users’ attention to. It should, therefore, drive action to make your users click.
Connect
Once your Twitter profile is looking shipshape, it’s time to actually be social. Follow people, like and retweet others’ tweets, engage with your community and get involved. People will follow you back and check out your page and see all that you have to offer.
But be sure to keep it relevant and genuine. Follow similar brands to your own and don’t go on a crazed following or retweeting spree. Use hashtags used in your niche to engage in the community and find like-minded people.
Optimise and Convert
Create a great first impression of your brand by optimising your Twitter profile. Choose a memorable handle, add an eye-catching profile picture and high-quality header image, craft a concise but memorable bio with a strategic and trackable link and audience-targeted location, post relevant, quality and useful content, pin an action-driving tweet, and engage in the online community. With a fully optimised Twitter profile as part of your social media strategy, you can start to build trust, showcase your brand, get involved in the community, and convert visitors into loyal customers.