Every second, on average, over 6,000 tweets are posted to Twitter. That’s more than 360,000 tweets per minute, 500 million tweets per day, and about 200 billion per year1! That makes Twitter one of the most popular social media tools to grow a subscription business. As an added bonus, it’s free and easy to use online or on the go. To maximize its effectiveness, we need to use Twitter the right way.
Followers are much more than a number
Let’s start by taking a look at our Twitter audiences, potential goldmines for subscription businesses. First, using Twitter effectively is much more than growing followers and throwing content at them. Instead, we want to engage our target audiences by providing them with useful information and engaging them in dialogue.
Think of Twitter, or any social media tool, as a conversation -a two-way relationship with both parties contributing to the discussion. This enables us to better understand what our potential and existing subscribers want from us, which could include anything of value to them such as industry news, how to guides, tips for how our products or services can improve or enhance their lives, links to useful articles, inspirational quotes, etc.
With that as a basis, we offer these 22 top tips for using Twitter to grow a subscription business.
Twitter Audience
1. Grow your target audience first by following like-minded Twitter users, prospective subscribers, industry thought leaders and others you find interesting or engaging. Start by following other companies that you respect, news outlets, government entities – anyone that might tweet something relevant to your followers. Their tweets will appear in your feed, and if you find that their tweets are not of interest, you can always unfollow, mute or even block them later.
2. Another way to grow your audience is to find your ideal subscriber on Twitter and see who that person is following. Follow those that fit your needs and interests and who are most likely to become subscribers.
3. Create lists of followers in Twitter to categorize them. Examples could be Subscribers (or VIPs if they wouldn’t want to be identified) in one list, Subscription Sites in another and Social Media Experts in a third list. Note: when you add someone to a list, they will be notified that they’ve been added to your list.
4. Identify and unfollow inactive followers manually or with tools like Just Unfollow or Unfollowers.
5. Consider unfollowing Twitter accounts without profile photos or bios, or those who only retweet (RT), but don’t post original content or advice of their own. We’ve seen a trend recently where a Twitter account will show a person’s name and photo, but the bio is a quote and the person has never tweeted. These are most likely bogus accounts.
6. Once upon a time, Twitter etiquette recommended that you follow everyone who follows you. That’s no longer the unwritten rule. Use your discretion and only follow back if that person has potential value.
7. Develop clear goals for following other accounts. For example, follow subscription publishers and industry leaders, or reach out to your target audience – potential subscribers – and follow people based on their interests.
8. To attract your target audience, optimize your Twitter profile with a photo of you or your company logo (400 x 400 pixels), describe clearly and succinctly what you do, add a URL to your website and a header photo that represents you or your business (1500 x 500 pixels).
9. Engage other Twitter users by retweeting their tweets or “favoriting” them (click on the star below the tweet to mark it as a favorite). Check your notifications tab regularly and acknowledge mentions and respond when appropriate. You can also set up email alerts to let you know when certain activities occur (e.g., new follow, mention, retweet, favorite, etc.) Twitter is a two-way conversation, so give as well as you get.
10. Thank people for their retweets and favorites, and include a shout out to your favorite Twitter users on Follow Friday, #FF. Follow Friday is a tradition in Twitter where, every Friday, regular Twitter users recommend their favorite tweeps (Twitter people) to their own followers, using the hashtag #FF or #FollowFriday.
Twitter Strategy, Goals and Content
11. Develop clear goals for tweeting. For example, a goal for tweeting might be to increase the number of followers by 5% per month or to increase daily/weekly/monthly engagement on Twitter by 10% (Twitter’s free analytics can help you measure this).
12. Use hashtags whenever appropriate. Hashtags are essentially keywords, preceded by the pound sign (e.g., #subsites, #2015superbowl, #quotes, #goldenglobes). Hashtags are used by tweeps to draw attention to and to categorize their tweets. They are also searchable so other users can follow everyone using a particular hashtag. This is very popular during sporting events, breaking news and other high profile topics. One or two hashtags per tweet are ideal. According to Gerry Moran of MarketingThink.com, tweets with hashtags receive two times more engagement than those without hashtags. Tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% higher engagement than those with three or more. Tweets with more than two hashtags show a 17% drop in engagement.
13. Opinions on this vary, but we like the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your content is informational and 20% is promotional. Informational content could be links to someone else’s content, such as an article with industry news or a link to someone else’s blog post on getting the most from your subscription. An example of a promotional tweet might be to share a link to your most recent blog post where you tweet a promotional subscription offer or seasonal discount.
14. Position yourself as an industry expert by providing useful information and being a “go to” person in your industry to answer questions. For example, Subscription Site Insider might tweet one of these tips.
15. Share information from respected industry leaders, using a wide variety of sources.
16. Use your Twitter account as a central customer service hub for your subscribers. This is popular with many businesses. If you choose to do this, we recommend that you include the hours the account will be monitored in your profile, so subscribers are not expecting round-the-clock service.
17. Repeat your tweets. No matter how many followers you have, they aren’t all going to be online at the time you are tweeting. You can use a service like HootSuite that optimizes the best times for posting, but we recommend you repeat your tweets too to ensure your best stuff gets seen.
18. Measure your success. Be sure to check your web stats or analytics to see which tweets are producing click-throughs to your own site or blog. Look at the time of day your site is being accessed. What countries are generating the most traffic? What’s your bounce rate? What pages are readers entering and exiting on? You can get this information from your web host, Google Analytics or another analytics application. Twitter also offers free analytics to help you measure your followers’ level of engagement with you. These are great, free tools with a wealth of information, so make the most of them by reviewing them on a regular basis.
19. Include images when appropriate to increase engagement with prospective subscribers, especially product photos and promotional offers.
20. Do not send automatic direct messages (auto DMs). They are impersonal, often promotional and universally disliked. They might also get you unfollowed.
21. Tweets are forever, so make sure they are typo and error free, and avoid public rants on professional accounts. Sure, you can delete a tweet, but it might live online forever – or be seen by those you least want to see it.
22. For promotional content, optimize blog posts and online articles with engaging titles to increase the chance that a follower will click on the link and retweet your post.
Subscription Site Insider Bonus:
5 Twitter Tools to Optimize Your Time and Tweets
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Here is a brief list of tools that complement Twitter to improve your engagement and optimize your productivity:
1. HootSuite: More than 10 million users manage their social media accounts with HootSuite, including scheduling tweets, posting to multiple accounts, etc. The basic version is free. The pro and enterprise versions start at $8.99/month.
2. If This Then That (IFTTT): Set up “recipes” for optimizing your productivity. For example, you could create a recipe that says if you post a new photo to Instagram, the photo file is automatically saved to your Dropbox folder. Free.
3. TweetDeck: View all of your Twitter accounts in one convenient, easy to use dashboard. Free.
4. Twitter app,iOS and Android: Monitor multiple Twitter accounts on the go with a mobile app. Free.
5. Buffer: Use Buffer to help you schedule posts to different social media accounts and view detailed analytics. With the free account, you can connect to one account on each type of social media (e.g., Facebook page, Facebook profile, Twitter, LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn company page). To connect to up 10 profiles, sign up for the Awesome plan at a cost of $10/month.
1Twitter usage statistics by Internet Live Stats as of 1/10/15.
