If your small or local business isn’t using social media, then there’s a whole digital world out there waiting to be discovered for your company! Social media is a way of connecting with customers and prospects alike, that makes communication or interaction more personable. This gives your business the opportunity to make real and strong relationships, and hold onto them by interacting with them regularly to show that you care. If you haven’t already checked out our first blogs in this series, feel free to take a look at our blog on how social media marketing can help your business, as well as our second blog in the series that covers some advanced social media tactics. Today, we’d like to cover some tips on how you can get more traction on Twitter, so without further ado, let’s get started!
What’s Trending on Twitter
Now, we’ve gone over hashtags before, but we wanted to review with you a little about hashtags before we move forward with some of our tricks, because they will be used in some of our advanced techniques! A hashtag is a tool that you can use on popular social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, to make your posts more discoverable by identifying a subject area or topic you are referencing in your post. In simpler terms, using hashtags is a way of organizing your posts so that people who have similar interests as you will be able to find them. To use a hashtag, you use the hash or pound sign followed by a word or phrase, such as #ParadisoInsurance, #CTinsurance, or #Insurance, to list a few that we use regularly. For instance, if I made a post about what I was doing outdoors on a nice spring day, I could use hashtags such as #SpringFever, #outdooradventure, or #outdoorliving to make my post get discovered by more people. The reason it gets discovered is because there will be other people looking for popular hashtags, such as someone who is actually looking for fun activities to do on a spring day, who will search for hashtags such as #SpringFever or #outdooradventure, and they will find your post that way!
Now that we’ve reviewed hashtags, let’s talk about something new: hashtags.org. This website will allow you to discover what hashtags are trending, or in other words, which hashtags will leverage the most traction or engagement by using them in your posts. To do this, simply visit www.hashtags.org, then on their homepage, you’ll notice that there are categories for “Trending Hashtags” or “Popular Hashtags.” Within these groups, look for hashtags that you could use in your posts, and leverage them to your advantage. Be sure to only include hashtags that are relevant to your company or industry, or else they will look out of place.
Get in Touch with the Locals
There’s another way you can leverage your posts in the Twitter world to get more traction by posting to an audience that shares similar interests, and this time, we’ll be targeting geography primarily. On Twitter, you have the ability to look for people who are posting within your area, and this will give you a chance to connect with them accordingly. To do this, simply start by searching for a keyword that pertains to your business in the upper right hand search bar on Twitter’s home page.
After that, you’ll see some search results, and an tab in the upper right hand corner that says “More options.” First, click on “More options,” then click on “Advanced search” at the bottom.
After that, you can fill in fields such as location, specific hashtags, keywords or phrases, dates, or even the mood of a post to find others tweeting about subjects that pertain to your industry. One way we take advantage of advanced Twitter search in our agency is to do a location search for other businesses in Connecticut to find small, locally owned companies to connect with for our program, the Partners of Paradiso. By finding more Twitter users in your area, you can engage on their posts, look to earn their engagement, and establish a stronger reach in the local area. At the end of the day, more user engagement is what you’re looking for on social media, so take advantage of these techniques wherever you see the opportunity!