Using social media to market your business is now a norm, and if you haven’t joined the party yet – you better get to it.

We’ve written and read countless articles about why social media marketing works and why no business should be without at least one social media account. All of this is true but what’s the point in using social media if you don’t know what you’re doing. This article discusses the importance of tapping into different communities on Twitter by making use of scheduling apps and hashtags.

It’s easy enough to send out a tweet a day and follow industry related people, but how do you reach the “right” people and get them to follow you?

What’s Your Demographic?

As an example, let’s look at radio advertising. It is a complex and strategic business as you need to know which demographics listen to which stations and at which time. Those who listen early in the morning (on their way to work for instance) do not listen to the radio at night time. So when do you advertise?

Twitter works very much in the same way. Certain factors need to be taken into account and you need to realise that people are habitual, and habits are action and time bound. Some check their tweets first thing in the morning; others do it before they go to bed at night. You shouldn’t assume that your audience is only active during certain timeslots.

As a social media marketer you should also accommodate your audience’s type of content consumption. This means, do they prefer video, text, sound or images? Are they lookers, observers, readers, commenters or influencers? You should make sure that your audience knows exactly what to expect when clicking through on a link you tweeted. This is done, firstly, by correct language use and, secondly, by using hashtags.

Time Frames

A tweet has a very short lifespan so it’s important to tweet as often as possible – which is not very difficult thanks to scheduling apps like HootSuite and Buffer.

Scheduling apps makes it easy to keep track of what you tweet and when you tweet. Remember, don’t post 24 tweets in a row, it looks spammy and won’t have as much of an impact as when you spread these out evenly over 24 hours.

It’s also important to realise that your followers might not be in the same country as you, and they might not even be potential clients. Having a wide spread following makes you look impressive - not only to new followers but to Google as well. Your location is not necessarily the location of your followers.

Hashtags

On Twitter, the pound sign (or hash) turns any word or group of words that directly follow it into a searchable link. This allows you to organize content and track discussion topics based on those keywords – Rebecca Hiscott (The Beginner’s Guide to the Hashtag).

Anyone who is the least bit familiar with social media understands how hashtags work. Those who are not, however, don’t always realise the importance of this little symbol.

Hashtags are essential to the way we communicate online. They allow you to be searched, found and followed.

When choosing which hashtags to use it’s a good idea to do a search (on Twitter) and check which # are trending and which one’s your audience are most interested in.

The @SoundIdea account, for instance, use #contentmarketing in most tweets. When this # is not used we gain fewer followers and have less interaction. When we change it to #inboundmarketing we gain a whole different set of followers.

Understanding Your Demographic

You can define your Twitter communities through times of the day and hashtags. In fact, these communities might all have the same industry in common, but they are distinct because of the hashtags they use.

At first glance Twitter might seem pretty straightforward, but there’s a lot to the social media giant that you should get to grips with before you can really start making an impact.

It comes down to this – tweet often as to reach all of your followers, and use relevant hashtags. Understanding and employing these two points will do your profile a world of good.

Carina Claassens is a Writer for Sound Idea Digital | carina@soundidea.co.za | www.soundidea.co.za

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