Twitter is a top option among the channels you can use to build an audience for your personal brand.
People ranging from entrepreneurs to students are taking advantage of Twitter’s engaged user base and short form content creation options to raise their thought leadership profiles, and promote their businesses.
If you are using Twitter as a channel to help accomplish your personal brand goals, apply these Twitter social media marketing best practices in your strategy.
Twitter social media marketing tips covered in this blog post:
Just like with Instagram and LinkedIn, Twitter uses hashtags to bookmark content about similar topics and to help bring conversations together.
You can take advantage of Twitter hashtags to increase exposure for your Tweets, and to help reach your target audience. Research from Agorapulse suggests that Tweets with hashtags get twice as much engagement as Tweets without hashtags. This includes Tweets with hashtags being 55% more likely to be retweeted — a critical form of engagement that maximizes Tweet reach. However, moderation is important, as Tweets with more than two hashtags saw a 17% drop in engagement.
When including hashtags in your Tweets, the first step is determining the best hashtags to use based on your niche. You want to use hashtags that other people in your industry use so that your content shows up in relevant conversations, and so that you are using terms that people in your industry are likely to search. For example, if you work in marketing and specialize in SEO, including the hashtag “#SEO” in your Tweets may help to increase discoverability for your content among your target audience.
Once you have a list of relevant hashtags determined for your brand, it’s time to include them in your Tweets. Tweets can contain an unlimited number of hashtags as long as the number of characters does not exceed the Tweet character limit. However, stuffing your Tweets full of hashtags will make them look spammy and lead to poor engagement, as noted above in Agorapulse’s research.
Try setting a rule for your brand’s Twitter strategy when it comes to hashtag volume. For example, always including 1-2 hashtags in your Tweets is a good baseline to follow. You can include hashtags naturally for key terms within the actual copy of your tweet, as well as creating a list of hashtags to include at the end of your tweets as is common in Instagram captions.
Related: Personal Branding Checklist - Essentials Every Personal Brand Needs [Free Guide + Examples]
Another Tweet feature to take advantage of is the ability to tag Twitter profiles belonging to individuals and brands. When drafting a Tweet, using the “@” symbol will enable you to tag people and pages just like you would on another social platform like Facebook or TikTok.
Including tags for relevant accounts will increase Tweet exposure. When someone tags your profile or company page on Twitter, your followers see the Tweet in their newsfeed with a label stating that you were mentioned in the Tweet.
Take advantage of this by tagging relevant people from your audience and fellow creators whenever possible. This is especially a good policy for situations where you are sharing another creator’s work, like a case study, or highlighting a customer. For example, if you Tweet a video interview that you conducted with an industry peer, you should tag their profile in the Tweet copy when you share the video interview.
Tagging Twitter company pages and profiles in your Tweets also has the benefit of increasing the likelihood that the profile or page you tag will engage with your Tweet. At a minimum, it’s common for company pages and tagged individuals to like your Tweet, which boosts engagement. There is also the chance that the person you tag shares your Tweet with their own network, which will multiply impressions and exposure for your brand’s Tweet.
Related: Personal Branding Action Plan - Checklist + Complete Guide for Starting Your Personal Brand
Tweets have a comments section that is similar to that of a LinkedIn post. People can comment on a Tweet, and the Tweet author has the ability to like Tweet comments and respond to them.
The more engagement a Tweet receives, the longer the Twitter algorithm will promote the Tweet in people’s Twitter feeds, leading to more impressions and engagement. Comments are a big factor in keeping the Tweet relevant and maintaining its position in people’s feeds.
In order to maximize the ROI of comments your Tweets receive, be sure to respond to every comment that a user sends you. The goal should be to make the comments section of your Tweets a place where conversations unfold, with the best case scenario being that you are able to spark a back and forth conversation with commenters and maximize the number of comments the Tweet receives, and in turn, adding to its impressions and exposure.
Comments are one of the most organic and direct methods of engaging with your audience, and represent a big opportunity for building brand awareness and trust with people. Considering your goal is to grow an engaged audience, missing the opportunity to make an impression on them by acknowledging their comments would be a mistake.
While scalability and efficiency are always a consideration for marketing strategies, sometimes the best marketing strategies are the least scalable because a personal touch builds real 1:1 relationships. Responding to people’s comments and showing them appreciation and acknowledgement is one such strategy.
Twitter ‘s short form content style, the high volume of content that is created, and the fact that not all of your followers are online at the same time means you need to Tweet consistently to have your content be seen.
For example, some accounts like news websites and media publications Tweet once per hour, sharing a recurring feed of their latest articles. Not only should you be Tweeting often so your Tweets are seen, you should Tweet the same content several times to maximize the number of your followers who see it. This can be done with copy and graphic edits in order to not make the content feel too repetitive for followers who do see each Tweet.
Establishing a consistent publishing cadence is a pillar of social media marketing strategies across platforms, including Twitter. Publishing a slew of Tweets one day, and then disappearing for weeks will lead to inconsistent engagement, and limited growth for your personal profile or company page.
Aside from inconsistency, over-Tweeting on a given day will come across as spammy, and could lead to you losing valuable audience members. This is why it’s important to find a publishing schedule that is both realistic given your time constraints, and still achieves your goals for growth on Twitter.
Related: 7 Personal Branding Tips to Help Grow Your Audience and Influence
Establish a consistent Tweet schedule that you have the time and resources to stick to. Examples of tiered approaches to content calendars include Tweeting one update per week as a starter, advancing to 2-3 Tweets per week once you have the platform down and have enough content, and then Tweeting daily updates as your Twitter presence and content creation process starts to hit its stride.
In our discussions on personal brand goals, we suggest the idea of “mini goals” that lead up to your long term goals. For example, if your long term goal is to reach 1,000 Twitter followers, setting a Tweet schedule like the one outlined above is a tangible metric you can measure and stick to week over week that will lead to your long term goal.
Use social media automation platforms to help structure your Twitter content calendar. Popular social media automation platforms like HubSpot allow you to draft and schedule Tweets in advance so you can ensure they publish at the desired time and cadence.
This also has the added benefit of enabling you to write your Tweets for the week, or even weeks in advance in one sitting so you don’t risk forgetting, or end up not having time in your schedule.
These social media automation platforms have other beneficial features besides Tweet publishing, such as analytics (see more below), social listening to track your audience engagement and relevant conversations happening in your industry, and suggested content tools to provide you with future content ideas.
Related: Personal Brand Framework: 5 Steps to Defining Your Personal Brand [plus a free template]
Once you have your Twitter account up and running and have gone through a few weeks of Tweeting, you can start comparing different Tweet types that you’ve published (i.e. an image Tweet vs. video Tweet, or an image Tweet vs. text-only Tweet) to uncover insights specific to your brand and audience. This type of data is invaluable for guiding your Twitter marketing strategy.
To uncover Tweet metrics, you can leverage Twitter’s built-in analytics portal, or one of the 3rd party social media marketing automation platforms mentioned above.
While logged into Twitter on your computer or phone’s browser you can go to “analytics.twitter.com” to see Twitter’s analytics portal.
This portal allows you to track the following per month:
Twitter analytics on platforms like HubSpot and Sprout Social are more robust, featuring the standard metrics above, as well as additional features.
These include the ability to measure things like:
Setting aside follower growth and profile views, when it comes to measuring the performance of Tweets, these of metrics standard metrics are good ones to track:
A/B Test Different Tweet Formats
Conducting A/B tests using the analytics tools above will uncover what Tweet types are driving the most engagement from your audience. For example, you could run an A/B test by Tweeting 5 images and 5 preview link Tweets (a link to an article with an auto generated preview image) and compare the averages and totals across the two categories of Tweets.
Comparing which Tweet type drove the most comments, likes, retweets and clicks will indicate which content your audience engages with most.
The key here is to then invest more resources in creating content that drives the results you are looking for. For example, if your goal is purely audience growth, engagement metrics for comments, likes, and shares matter more to you because they lead to more Tweet impressions, and in turn, a higher likelihood of attracting new followers. If you are set on driving website traffic, link clicks are your biggest priority, and Tweeting the content type that is driving the most clicks should guide your content strategy.
As your Twitter presence becomes more mature and you have a larger number of Tweets, compare their performance with larger sample sizes, like batches of 25 or 50 tweets to get more accurate A/B test data.
Ever since Twitter added threads as a content type—the ability to publish a series of connected Tweets—the content format took off on the platform, and has become one of the top performing content types in the platform.
You will see people across industries publishing threads to help grow their personal brands. The long form content type makes it possible to discuss more complex information on Twitter.
Twitter thread possibilities include:
And here are some examples from prominent creators:
Each of these thread examples shows a different way Twitter threads can be used, demonstrating their versatility. Telling stories, listing tools and how-to steps for processes, and posting case studies are all further examples of ways you can leverage Twitter threads to create valuable content for your audience.
Going back to our point about setting mini goals for content publishing quotas, many creators commit to publishing 1 thread per week as a mini goal that is designed to help them reach broader goals, like audience growth.
Try committing to a quota of your own, whether it be weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Start small, and work your way up as you get more comfortable and efficient with writing threads.
While not technically an activity related to your own Tweets, this tip about engaging with Tweets from other users will lead to better engagement on your own content. By commenting and engaging in conversation on Tweets from thought leaders in your niche, you will receive these benefits:
The mini goals quota strategy can be applied here, too. Try setting a daily or weekly quota for commenting on a certain number of posts and watch your followers and engagement rates on your own Tweets increase.
Related: Personal Brand Audit: Assess Your Personal Brand [free guide]
Twitter is one of the platforms of choice for professionals, entrepreneurs, students, and creators interested in personal brand growth. Twitter’s content creation options and dynamic newsfeed serve as catalysts for the type of content engagement and conversations that are perfect for personal brand audience building. Take advantage of the Twitter social media marketing tips in this blog post to grow your own personal brand on Twitter.
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Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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