Twitter is huge.
There are around 300 million monthly users on the platform.
And a lot of them are active.
It’s a place where many influencers thrive, and it’s also a medium to reach prospects, no matter what your purpose is.
In this guide, we take a look at how to do Twitter outreach like a pro, and we examine the best ways to build traffic organically. It’s pretty much your complete guide on using Twitter to the fullest.
Ready? Let’s do this.
#growth
How Do You Do Outreach on Twitter?
Twitter is a little different from other social networks.
Its content is short, snappy, and designed to be consumed quickly.
The whole platform was created for people’s voices to be heard and engaged.
And that’s a good thing.
It prioritizes human interactions with each other, and you can leverage that to do outreach.
We’re going to split this guide into the following:
- Voice
- Profile Optimization
- Tweeting
- Growing Your Followers
- Engaging
- Co-Creating
- Messaging
- Integration into Omnichannel
Choose Your Twitter Voice
The first thing you have to do on Twitter is find your voice.
Think of this as the personality you’ll take on in the platform.
It determines what types of followers you’ll attract and how your content will resonate will people.
You want first to research the type of people that your target audience follows and aim to adapt their content to your style. This way, you automatically have subject matter for your content while layering your own voice in.
(This is the same way we help our clients succeed on LinkedIn at BAMF, we take their stories and the interests of their audience and package it in their unique voice.)
Now, this doesn’t mean you should copy other people’s voices.
It would help if you still had a unique twist on your take and tweets.
Optimize Your Profile
Before doing outreach, you need to optimize your profile.
Twitter profiles are shorter than typical social media profiles, but that doesn’t mean they’re easier to optimize. Since they’re shorter, you need to pack a better punch on the platform.
Now we have an extensive guide on how to optimize Twitter profiles that you will find in the link below, but we’ll offer you a couple of tips here to get you started on your Twitter outreach journey.
How to optimize your Twitter profile? Here’s how.
Your profile serves as your landing page, so it needs to convert people who land on it.
There is no choice but to optimize your profile.
Here’s the TL;DR on Twitter profile optimization.
Profile Photo
Make sure it’s a good headshot that’s appealing, put on your best smile, and make sure that the background is uncluttered. It has to be inviting enough for people to follow you. You don’t have to wear clothes that you’d wear to a meeting; Twitter allows you to be a little more casual.
Cover Photo
Your cover photo has to tie into your branding. It can be a photo of you in action, something that converts with a CTA, or simply something artistic – if you want to give off that vibe. There’s no pressure to make it absolutely actionable – this isn’t Facebook or LinkedIn – so you can show off a little more of your personality with this section.
Location
It would help if you were to set yourself in the exact location as your target market. Still, if you run a solution available to everyone internationally or nationwide, you can select your location as your company office.
Bio
You only have a few characters to use here, so it has to be punchy. Make sure it tells people what you do and gets them to want to follow you.
We usually start with your job title, your work, and maybe something a little personal about you. You can even add your website or social links in this section.
Pinned Tweet
Your pinned tweet is the first tweet that your potential followers are going to see in your account, so it has to reflect all the tweets that you’re putting out holistically. An alternative to picking a pinned tweet is to pick one that has the most engagement so that visitors to your account will see that you’re getting traction.
Tweeting
Now we can create a complete guide on tweeting, but for the purposes of Twitter outreach, you want to be as active as possible.
Aim to tweet at least once every weekday, with occasional tweets on the weekends. It would help if you did this to increase your marketing surface area and get your Twitter account warmed up.
Also, the more you tweet, you also increase your chances of a tweet going viral.
What Should You Tweet About?
Here are a couple of tweet ideas you can follow:
- Facts about your industry
- Quotes from thought leaders
- Links to resources or blog posts on your site – they have to be valuable for your followers to like them
- Retweets of exciting tweets from other companies or influencers
- Photos and infographics
- Short videos that have captions
- Your thoughts and takeaways
When you’re still trying to find your style, make sure you experiment with different tweet types. This helps with your voice.
Growing Your Twitter Followers
Okay, now that you’ve got your voice, an optimized Twitter profile, and are tweeting, it’s time to get your follower count up. Now you can skip this step and let the followers come in organically and jump into outreach, but sometimes it can help when you’re trying to reach out to prospects.
You see, having a good follower count shows people you’re reaching out that you’re legit and that your thoughts are being heard.
It acts as a form of social proof.
Here are a couple of tips to grow your number of Twitter followers.
Post Content That Resonates
Remember the first step?
“Choose Your Twitter Voice”
This means that you need to make sure that whatever you’re posting resonates with the type of people that you want to attract.
When your content randomly falls into people’s feeds, they’ll end up following you if they like what you have to offer.
Another tip is to provide value.
Follow People
Want to get followed?
Then, make sure you’re following people in the first place.
Sure, many people might not follow you back for the sake of growing their own follower base, but you’ll find that many will organically want to follow you because of the content you’re putting out.
Should You Buy Twitter Followers?
Don’t buy Twitter followers.
Most of them will be bots, and the rest aren’t even excellent quality.
But, you know what’s worse?
When people see that you have a crowd of fake followers following you, they’ll mislabel you as someone who can’t be trusted or just fronting.
Organic followers are still the best way to make sure you have a steady stream of engagements coming in.
Think of them as an audience that’s already segmented.
They like your posts, and your content resonates with them. And you know this because they chose to follow you!
So, grow it organically, like how we do it at BAMF.
Do Your Targeting Outside of Twitter
You don’t need to start your outreach inside Twitter, you can start from the outside and use the platform as one of your mediums to reach the person you want to engage with.
For example, say you were trying to reach an influencer on LinkedIn but you don’t have a chance to fight for their inbox attention. You can always look them on Twitter and try to engage with them there.
By doing this you’re not just limited to one platform for your outreach or lead generation needs, and you’re just using Twitter as one of the many tools in your toolkit.
Engaging
You need to engage with them first before you start reaching out to people as part of your Twitter outreach.
This means:
- Following them
- Liking some of their tweets
- Replying to their content
- And, sometimes even mentioning them when you tweet in your account
By doing this, you get influencers to start noticing your existence on the platform, which helps build indirect rapport with them.
Now, you don’t want to be calling them out constantly.
That will annoy them and make it look like you really want something from them.
The trick is to make it look as organic as possible.
Tag them if you want to collaborate with them, reply if they have content that moves you, but don’t interact with them for the sake of interacting.
It still has to be genuine.
If they reply to you, tweet back, or like your engagement, that’s an excellent sign to reengage with them after some time.
Please don’t do it too many times in a row; it’s good to put some space in between your engagements because you don’t want to seem too pushy.
Hit That Retweet Button (Or Quote!)
One of the best compliments on the platform is getting retweeted, and this applies to the people you’re reaching out to.
If they’re popular, they might get a lot of retweets for their good tweets, but you don’t have to limit yourself to that. You can always retweet their less popular tweets to get their attention.
Be generous with your retweets because they work not only to compliment people but also to increase your activity on the platform – and you need that activity because it helps build you up.
A good alternative is to quote a tweet instead of retweeting, this allows you to inject your opinion and get noticed by the prospect you’re targeting. Plus, it’s also a bit of personalization!
Reaching Out to People
Once you’ve engaged with the people you’re targeting, it’s time to reach out to them.
Now, you can either do this in one of two ways.
You can use the built-in Twitter direct messaging platform, or you can try to get ahold of them through other means.
It doesn’t have to be a long message, but something short such as:
Hey *prospect name* I loved the last tweet you made about *specific industry thought they have*; I was wondering how you would feel about collaborating? I’ve recently done a project with *reference how that relates with their last tweet*
Something that simple is enough.
Don’t write a full-on essay; it’s Twitter, not email, so they are used to short things; you need to make sure you write just enough to keep them hooked and get them talking.
This usually does the trick as long as you’ve been engaging with them beforehand.
Co-Creating
Another method that seems to work after you’ve established your presence on Twitter is the offer of co-creating.
It can be anything as direct as asking them to collaborate through a direct message or calling them out directly with a tweet.
Be warned that if you use the latter strategy, you need to have already built a relationship beforehand because you risk putting them on the spot, which could be detrimental.
Integration into Omnichannel
Twitter is just one of the channels you have at your disposal.
There are plenty of other ways to engage with your prospects outside of the platform.
You can hit them up on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
What’s critical is that you follow an omnichannel approach to ensure you have all your bases covered. This is important to maximize the surface area of
Key Takeaways on Twitter Outreach
Twitter outreach is a great addition to your digital marketing toolkit because it allows you to reach prospects in the most organic way possible.
It’s a great platform to use if you want to reach out to an influencer or a media contact.
However, relying on Twitter outreach alone isn’t the best way to get results.
You still need to integrate it with your omnichannel approach.
That is the only way you can get a more holistic system to bringing in digital marketing leads from multiple fronts.
We highly suggest that you add it to your toolkit if you haven’t done so already to maximize the surface area of your digital marketing.
