Twitter News for Marketers

Here’s a heads-up for businesses that use Twitter to market their brands: there are some interesting changes coming to the Twitterverse, new features that will affect the way users interact with the popular social media platform while also providing some new advertising opportunities. A recent Visual.ly blog post by Lisa Hoover McGreevy offers some tips on how to prepare for these changes so that as soon as they go live you can hit the ground running.

One thing Twitter execs have said they’d like to do is to help make new users more comfortable in the space. Brands should be thinking about these new users, finding ways of encouraging them to tweet and follow and otherwise engage, McGreevy writes. So when you’re cooking up a contest or promotion, be sure to make it Twitter-specific, with incentives that generate Twitter-specific activity. Twitter is also working on ways to increase traffic from search engines—which means marketers need to make sure their brands’ Twitter feeds are optimized accordingly, and that they are using hashtags competently and effectively.

How Twitter users engage with the ads that turn up in their feeds will soon be easier to track as well. So if you’re not reading your analytics, you’d better start, McGreevy warns. (“How will you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?”) Twitter’s own TweetDeck is a free tool for tracking marketing reach and user response, but there are others, many of which you have to pay for. Click here to read about 16 tools every social media manager should use.

And finally, McGreevy notes that as Twitter expands its video options, marketers should start thinking about how to incorporate video content into their Twitter-based campaigns. Learn how to use the new Promoted Video feature, for starters. (Twitter offers this guidance.) For more ideas, check out McGreevey’s five rules for video content marketing in 2015.