With more than 335 million users, X, formerly known as Twitter, is a fantastic platform for any brand looking to engage their audience with short, punchy content, especially if your content marketing focuses heavily on fast-paced news cycles.
While X/Twitter is clearly brimming with potential for your social media marketing, it’s essential to make sure you’re sticking to established best practices, and avoiding some of the common mistakes many brands trip over during Twitter marketing drives.
In this post, we’ll go over seven common X/Twitter social media marketing mistakes to avoid in your next campaign.
1. Incorrect Hashtag Use
Twitter invented the hashtag, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it's one of the major predictors for success when you’re running a marketing campaign.
Simply picking a few hashtags that seem relevant to your posts isn’t enough to ensure they’re an asset to your tweets, and you’ll need to plan out your hashtags carefully to get the most out of this feature.
Some things to avoid when picking hashtags for your tweets include:
- Using hashtags just because they’re popular, without considering their relevance to your audience.
- Not researching the volume or “buzz” around your hashtags, and using ones that are too niche or unpopular to make a difference to your visibility.
- Failing to vary the types of hashtags you use, e.g local, branded, industry, etc.
When they’re used correctly, hashtags can be a great way to expand your reach past your core audience, so don’t let them fall into obscurity by making these common slip-ups.
2. Not Making Time for Engagement
One of the things that makes X unique among popular social media platforms is that the value of a piece of content isn’t so much baked into the initial tweet you make, but the conversations that happen as a result of it.
Though audience interaction is important across all social media platforms, you won’t be able to “set and forget” your posts and expect the same level of visibility and marketing traction like you would on some other platforms, for example Instagram.
The general audience on Twitter is attracted to content that has plenty of comments underneath it, where they can explore a variety of opinions, perspectives, and citations that delve deeper into the topic.
Whenever you post on X/Twitter, be sure to set some time aside to revisit it and engage with your audience by replying to comments, retweeting relevant content, and generally being an active part of the conversation.
3. Neglecting Personalization
With only 280 characters per tweet, X doesn’t give you a lot of “wiggle room” for adjusting your content to the nuances of your audience. However, it’s still important to tailor your Twitter marketing strategy to the people you’re trying to reach, and maximize your chances of resonating with your audience more than the countless other tweets they see every day.
Some things to take into account when personalizing Twitter content calendars include:
- Creating detailed profiles on your audience segments who are active on Twitter.
- Developing a unique brand voice that will be easily distinguishable from your competitors.
- Analyzing responses to your content and using this to inform your audience profile.
Like any platform, taking the time to know your audience and personalize your content will go a long way in differentiating your brand from the competition, and maximizing engagement for your campaigns.
4. Failing to Approach Trends With Caution
Getting involved with social media trends can be a great way to increase visibility and engagement on social media, especially on Twitter where so much is focused on rapid news cycles and emerging trends.
However, it’s important to approach trends with caution, and make sure you’re only getting involved with trends that make sense for your brand identity and target audience.
If you jump on trends just because they’re popular, and force your brand identity into a conversation where it doesn’t naturally belong, you’re only going to be wasting time and resources.
At best, you won’t see the same kind of engagement you would for a more relevant trending topic. At worst, your tweets will come off as pandering, desperate, or awkward, and cause your audience to view your brand in a negative light.
5. Not Using Analytics
Posting on Twitter and monitoring the sentiment in the resulting conversation will give you some idea of how well it’s resonating with your audience, and whether or not your approach to content has been successful.
However, to build a more accurate picture of your audience behavior and how well your Twitter campaigns are performing, it’s crucial to get equipped with a purpose-built social media analytics tool showing your engagement metrics, audience demographics, Tweet visibility, and more.
Social media analytics tools like Highperformr platform will help you get an instant, accurate view of things like the kind of content that’s performing best, which audience segments are most likely to engage, the best times to post, and more. Our tool is also equipped with AI-powered trend analysis, which will interpret the data for you and highlight areas for improvement.
Get your social media tech stack equipped with robust analytics, and you’ll never fall into the trap of relying on guesswork as you work on developing your Twitter social media marketing.
6. Posting Too Often
X/Twitter is a fast-paced platform, and you’re going to have to increase your posting frequency compared to some other apps to keep your audience engaged. Having said that, it’s important not to lean too far the other way, and post so much that you’re overwhelming your audience.
Constant tweeting with updates that don’t offer much value to your audience will only tarnish your brand equity, make your profile appear spammy, and chase away followers.
Rather than focusing on having an active feed on X, it’s better to use analytics to identify content that’s most likely to engage and the times and dates when your audience is most active, then use this data to maximize value with every post in your calendar.
7. Focusing Too Much on Selling
The reason you’re investing in Twitter social media marketing is probably because you want to generate sales for a product or service. However, if you fill your feed with too much promotional content, your marketing might have the opposite effect.
People follow branded accounts like yours to keep up with industry news and learn valuable insights. If you’re bombarding them with information about your product or service, you’re going to come off as spammy or interruptive, and start hemorrhaging followers.
Furthermore, because promotional content is less likely to generate comments and shares, the X/Twitter algorithm will be less likely to show your tweets to the audience segments you’re targeting.
Try to restrict your “hard sell” tweets to flash sales and similar promotions, while focusing on publishing more organic, valuable content that will guide people naturally to links in your bio.
Upgrade Your Twitter Social Media Marketing
As you develop your X/Twitter social media marketing strategy, stay wary of these common pitfalls to ensure your feed stays valuable, engaging, and generally beneficial to your overarching goals.
If you want to support your Twitter marketing with robust analytics, convenient scheduling tools, AI tweet generation and more, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
