Practical Tips for PR Professionals: Marketing Via Twitter

Posted: August 30, 2011

As the media landscape becomes increasing competitive, PR and communications professionals must up their social game. These five tips will help you leverage Twitter for your marketing and communications efforts:

1. Identify casual followers vs. power users. Tools, such as Twitalyzer, are designed to help you learn who to follow and who has the most community influence based on who you’ve identified as being relevant and aligned with your target audiences.

2. Understand trending topics. Consider implementing timed tweets or paying to promote your account. Twitter offers advertisers the ability to promote their products, tweets, trends, and accounts via paid engagement. Promoted accounts see more visibility and come up at the top of Twitter searches and follower timelines.

3. Leverage employee profiles with branding. Twitter now offers websites the ability to incorporate a “follow” widget directly on the company’s site, streamlining the traditional “connect with us” process on Twitter. This widget can also be implemented on the bios of employees who blog on behalf of your company, brand or client so you are further connecting employee brand ambassador activity with your organization.

4. Strengthen your SEO efforts. The new Twitter search allows you to not only see the standard tweets, but also returns videos and pictures in the results. Newer browsers, such as Firefox with Twitter, offer the ability for users to type a hashtag or username in the address bar and find the results for that particular page.

5. Tie activities back to business goals and objectives. Always remember why your organization is engaging in Twitter. Free analytics only give you a portion of the picture. BurrellesLuce Social Media Monitoring (Engage121) allows you to create custom charts and graphs illustrating both quantitative and qualitative metrics, as well transcripts and charts of your favorite Twitter chats.

BottomLine: Build one-to-one relationships. BurrellesLuce Social Media Monitoring (Engage121) not only offers you the ability to build and manage your communities of interest; it also integrates traditional media with social media, allowing you to follow bylined journalists of traditional publications in one location. Connect with relevant journalist and bloggers via Twitter directly from your print and web coverage and create individual, custom social media campaigns—all in one place.

Biz Tip Source: Burrelles Luce