Marketing with Twitter

- [Voiceover] Over 300 million people worldwide turn to Twitter every day to talk about things that interest them. They might be interacting with a trending topic, such as the launch of a new iPhone, learning about world events, talking about their day-to-day life, or interacting with brands like yours. Being a business a Twitter is about creating and capturing these conversations. You might leverage Twitter to share details on a new product, a behind the scenes look at your process, or helpful tips that in turn can boost your retention. You might even convey your brand's personality by sharing other news from your industry or adding an opinion to an existing topic.

To be successful on Twitter, you'll need to take those core marketing objectives and break them down to what works on this platform. At a high level, what is it that you're hoping to accomplish, and how can you do so in small, short tweets. A tweet is basically the message that you share and you'll have a 140 characters to do it. So you've gotta be really creative. By understanding your objective, you'll be able to quickly identify whether or not your efforts are panning out. Now Twitter is similar in sorts to Facebook.

You'll create an account, design your page, and then you can publish and read tweets. The difference is that your tweets will get 100% deliverability to anyone who follows you. Now, does that mean they'll see your tweet? No, they have lots of other brands, businesses, and people they follow on Twitter. So they're going to be getting a stream of ideas all day long. So a good tweet has to stand out and be timely. But the good news is, you have relatively good assurance that Twitter is putting your content front and center on those that follow you.

So to get set up, you'll visit twitter.com and in the right-hand corner, you'll choose Sign up. It's pretty straight forward to get set up. You'll enter in your name, your phone or email, and a password. When you enter in your name, you're either going to put in your personal name or that of your brand. So let's say that we're setting up a Twitter for Henry Twill. I'll enter in Henry Twill, his email, and we'll select a password. From there, I'll choose Sign up. I'm going to skip the phone verification process and now we have the option to choose a username.

You wanna make sure that your username is short, easy to remember, and free from any characters like an underscore, or numbers if they're irrelevant. Now most usernames are taken given that Twitter is so popular. For example, if I enter in HenryTwill, Twitter's telling me this username is already taken. It's made some suggestions down below but I might wanna get more creative. I could try HTwill. Taken as well. I could try HenryTwillSport since that's a brand that he runs, and that seems to work.

However, I see TwillSport's available and that might be shorter and more relevant to what I'm doing. Pick a good username, one that's memorable. But remember, you can always change it later. I'll choose Next, and Twitter's going to move us through the process. I'll choose Let's go! and we can walk through a step of selecting some interests to help tailor Twitter to what we're doing. You can select the options that make sense to your objectives on Twitter. Twitter's going to give you suggestions on who you might be interested following.

You can go ahead and get started if you'd like, or unselect those options and choose Continue. You'll also need to walk through the rest of the steps to get your Twitter profile set up with a user photo, as well as a cover image, just like you did on Facebook. I'm gonna skip through these steps and just get us right in to the main components of Twitter. Now that we're logged in, you can see there's really not a whole lot going on. And that's because I haven't followed anyone, I haven't published any tweets. There's really just nothing exciting happening with Henry Twill's profile.

Here in the center screen would be your news feed. This is where all of the posts from those that you're following are going to appear. Along the top of the screen, you'd have access to Moments, which is a special section of Twitter that's curating content about what's happening right now. You'll see your Notifications which will bring in any updates about people that are retweeting or sharing your content. And you'll also see your Messages section which will provide you with updates when people send you a direct message. Another great thing about Twitter, is you have the option to publish ads.

And you can do that via ads.twitter.com. This is going to be very similar to Facebook ads. You can buy promoted tweets and engagements right through the Twitter interface. Now you'll notice when I visited this section, Twitter's telling me my account is ineligible. And that's because it's brand new. If you have a brand new account, you'll have to publish some tweets and hang out on the platform for a few days before you'll be eligible to participate in Twitter ads. Another great feature of Twitter is to check out analytics.twitter.com.

Once you arrive here, you'll select Turn analytics on, and this going to allow you to measure all of the impact that you have on Twitter. Now again, there's nothing going on with this account. So, this dashboard is absolutely blank. But as you begin to engage you audience, check in on your Twitter analytics as a way to see how things are going and how well you're doing engaging with your particular followers. If you decide that Twitter's right for you and you wanna go deeper? Check out my course on Twitter for Business. It's an in-depth overview on how to see success on this business within your social media efforts.