X (Twitter) Marketing Guide 2024

X, formerly known as Twitter, is an iconic social media platform known for connecting brands through sharing pop culture references, current events, as well as industry knowledge and education. Thus, utilizing this network to market your brand can allow you to connect with professionals, potential clients, and other businesses. Marketing your brand on Twitter can be important in achieving your business goals, increasing visibility, and expanding your opportunities.

How Do Businesses Use Twitter for Marketing?

When we think about a business’s Twitter account, we often think of memes, great comebacks, and funny commentaries. While this content is memorable, it only scratches the surface of how brands can use this platform. For example, sharing posts that include a link, video, image, or poll is a great way to drive traffic to a site or increase engagement.

Interacting with other brands and users is another way that businesses can get their content in front of a new audience and open conversations on the platform. As this is a microblogging network, by nature it encourages users to provoke conversations, questions, and opinions. Of course, it is also a platform that can come with heavy debating and passing news, true or not, with one another. Brands sure ensure their content strays away from posting content that can polarize users.

This reigns true with our 2023 Social Networks Study data, which found that while impressions were down across the board on LinkedIn in 2022. However, over the 2022-2023 year, interactions rose significantly across all account sizes. This means that while your posts may not reach as many users, those seeing your content are more likely to engage.

Therefore, creating content that is catered to your niche is important, as well as fostering the relationships and conversations you have opened up on the platform.

How to Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy

If you’re looking to add X to your content plan, you first need to create a marketing strategy that will outline your goals for using this platform, and define which tactics you will use to execute this strategy.

We recommend opening a business or creator account on Twitter, as this allows you to access analytics tools, select a category for your business, and use third-party tools for management capabilities.

STEP 1

Optimize your account

If you haven’t yet created a Twitter account, you can create one here. For those that already have an existing account, log in to your account and head to your profile page.

You will need to optimize your profile so that it best reflects your brand identity, which will be a key factor in having your business resonate with users.

⭐️ Username

Your username will be accompanied by a @ on X. Your name should be easy to recognize and if it’s possible, choose the same username as your other social media profiles. This way, it will be easier to find you and associate your Twitter profile with your brand. Whether it’s your name or brand name, keep it simple and avoid using any extra characters if possible.

▶️ How to Change Your Username on X (Twitter)◀️

⭐️ Profile picture

The same happens with your username, your profile picture should be easily associated with your brand and identity on the rest of your social media platforms. Use a photo that represents you and ideally the same picture that you have used on other social networks. Ideally, your logo should be your profile picture or professional headshot for individual accounts.

⭐️ Short bio

In your Twitter account, you can add a bio description of what your brand does, with the option to link your website or online store. You are limited to 160 characters in the text box, so it’s necessary to be succinct in this section.

We recommend adding a category to your profile, so you can label the industry your business is in without using extra characters.

⭐️ Cover photo

The cover photo is used to give a visual touch to your profile. You can even use an image as part of your advertising strategy. Use the colors of your brand so your cover photo reflects your corporate identity or personal brand. 

⭐️ Date and location

This part is optional. You can include your location and date of birth (or your brand’s founding date) if you want. Depending on your Twitter marketing goals, fill out this info or leave it blank.  

Once you have decided what you will include in your profile, it’s time to create your account, confirm that the username you want to use is available, and optimize your account to stand out from the rest.

⭐️ Verify your Twitter account

If you have a company or personal brand well known in the industry, getting your Twitter account verified will give you more authority amongst future followers and users who visit your profile.

In addition, it will help you to be found faster and clear out any doubt about the veracity of your Twitter profile.

➡️ How to Verify Your X (Twitter) Account ⬅️

STEP 2

Define your objectives, KPIs, and competitors

Now that the first step is done, as with any successful marketing action, the next step is to define the objectives for your Twitter strategy.

Defining your goals

What do you want to achieve on this social network? What type of content is adequate to reach your goals? Set your main goals for using this platform, and create 3-4 specific objectives for each goal, defining what you will do to reach this goal.

Then, think about who your ideal audience is on this platform. You can define these users based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, motivations, and pain points. When marketing your brand, think about how your product solves your customers’ pain points, and what problems they are looking to solve.

Once you have set your goals on Twitter, you must think about the content you will share to reach your target audience:

⚡️ Share high-quality content that relates to your ideal audience and niche.

⚡️ Create original content to stand out on the platform and win authority.

⚡️ Analyze other Twitter accounts to gain inspiration and generate content ideas.

⚡️ Benchmark your competitors, and see which strategies your competition is implementing.

⚡️ Add alt text to your Twitter images so that visually impaired users can understand your content.

Analyzing your competition

Seeing how your competitors are using this platform is an important part of your strategy. You can get very valuable information for your strategy including:

• The best-performing content formats
• Which content was most successful
• How to reply to users
• Impactful strategies

By viewing their top-performing content and analytics, you can use this data to drive your own goals. As your Twitter profile grows, you can continue to compare your content against your competitors.

STEP 3

Create a content plan and execute your strategy

Twitter content has more weight than other social media platforms, and as I mentioned above, as a brand you need to be careful in what posts you share. Therefore, it’s important to create a social media content plan as a guide to follow.

When creating this plan, consider the following:

• What are your brand’s content themes and content pillars? In order words, what topics will introduce in your content and in what tone?

• How often do you plan to post on this network?

• What content formats will you be using?

• How will you address your audience?

Below, you can find some valuable tips that will help you to improve your content strategy and therefore, your Twitter marketing strategy.

Schedule your content

X, apart from being immediate, is a very active social media platform where brands and people can post hundreds of tweets per day. If you only tweet once a week, it will be lost in your follower’s feed after a day. This explains why it is so important to keep your account active and post at least once a day if not multiple times.

Many tools allow you to schedule your content in advance so you can focus on other tasks.  For example, Metricool helps you to post automatically and discover when your audience is active to know when is best for you to post.

Also, you will have all your tweets organized in a very visually appealing way, so creating your content calendar is never a dread. Once your content has been posted, you can then view the impact of your tweets in real time and how the performance of your posts is evolving.

Post at your best hours

There is always a better time to publish personalized for you when most of your audience is active and therefore, when they will read your publications faster. This way you can increase your post interactions and brand visibility.

Take advantage of your best times to publish to have a bigger impact and earn more followers.

▶️ Discover Your Best Times to Post on Twitter ◀️

Use the right size images on Twitter

The sizes to use for pictures, videos, and GIFs are different for each social network. To this day, visual content is very important and it’s crucial that users can see the images complete and not pixelated. 

Social networks are a communication channel for many people, but that doesn’t mean that the quality of the content is secondary. We recommend that you pay attention to the correct size of your images on Twitter and make sure you use them when you share your photos. 

STEP 4

Continue to monitor your strategy

Now that you have begun to implement your marketing strategy on X, it’s important to continue to monitor your strategy to ensure you’re reaching your goals and winning clients in your efforts. If you’re looking for ways to improve your strategy and get creative, here are some ideas to spice up your content.

Connect your blog or podcast RSS to Metricool’s Autolists

Do you have a blog or podcast that comes out with weekly content? You can utilize Metricool’s Autolists feature to create a list of recurring content and connect the RSS feed of your blog or podcast so that when you have a new article or episode, it will send out a tweet to follow.

Use X for announcing events

Twitter is the best social network to share information about events using hashtags. As we mentioned before, Twitter is known for being immediate which helps to improve visibility and content diffusion. This is why most businesses use this social network to broadcast events to visualize their impact in real time and get new followers.

If you have an upcoming event, share this with your Twitter community to encourage them to sign up or join live on the day of the event.

Stay connected with your community

Since this platform has such a unique atmosphere, you can find a highly interactive community and continue to have valuable conversations. With this, it’s important to foster these relationships. Think of it as casual networking, where informal content and language are encouraged.

With Metricool’s Inbox management tool, you can view and respond to your X messages in one place.

Mix up your content

Since Musk’s entrance into Twitter, he has already made drastic changes to now called, X. While this has slightly changed the way we view this platform, overall it now has many features and content formats. For example, you can utilize polls,

• Create X Lists, which are similar to “Close Friends” on Instagram. This allows you to post to a close circle on the network to further facilitate those relationships.

• X Spaces allows you to host and connect to live video conversations on the platform.

• X Communities are similar to Instagram Broadcast Channels, in that they are exclusive spaces to share content based on different topics and niche industries.

Consider subscribing to X Premium

X Premium is a subscription service from Twitter that gives you the highly sought after blue checkmark, as well as other benefits such as editing posts after publishing, longer uploading capabilities, and being able to create a community.

STEP 5

Analyze Your Twitter marketing strategy

As with everything in marketing, it’s important to know if your strategies are working. This will allow you to make better decisions and allow your business to thrive naturally, rather than feel lost in why your accounts aren’t growing.

If you analyze your content and the evolution of your community, you will start to:

• Better understand your audience to see which topics they prefer, and if any areas have not yet been covered, which can include education on the industry or niche.

• View top-performing content with analytical breakdowns for metrics like impressions, engagement, reposts, replies, link clicks, profile clicks, and video views.

• Compare metrics against competitors in your industry to

With Metricool you can analyze how your strategy is working with a breakdown of your Twitter account evolutionary growth, and metrics for specific posts.

Paid Marketing: Creating X Advertising Campaigns

All of the strategies we have mentioned are mostly organic, and don’t include paid advertising. However, running ad campaigns can be a smart tactic if you want to promote an event, product launch, or discount.

X Ads is a tool that allows companies and users to create paid campaigns with a certain objective such as improving brand visibility, driving traffic to a website, increasing registrations, or converting leads.

Using the Ads Manager dashboard you can choose from over 10,000 conversation topics to target audiences and reach users with similar interests.

On this platform, you can create different types of ads, each of them with a different goal.

⚡️ Drive traffic to a website, event sign-up, registration, or landing page.

⚡️ Increase visibility on Twitter and reach new audiences.

⚡️ Segment your audience to create specific ads for them and reach more potential customers.

⚡️Attract users without exceeding the budget.

X Management with Metricool

With Metricool you can manage your X platform in the same place. Save time in your content creation process by:

• Scheduling your content ahead of time, so you can focus on other areas of your business or work.

• Analyzing content in minutes with metrics always at hand.

• Responding to replies and private messages, with the option to save texts so you can copy and paste commonly used replies.

Now that you are ready to build your X marketing strategy, you can use Metricool to measure your growth.

Sara Martín , 16 February 2024