Marisa SmithIf you’ve been paying any attention at all to Twitter, you’ve noticed a ton of new features and updates in the past year. Many of these features pose terrific marketing opportunities for your business.
Lost in the swirling sea of Twitter features? Don’t know what’s out there or where to begin? No worries — we’ve compiled the best marketing advice on the newest Twitter features. Check out these articles and jump into the sandbox!
Periscope
Easily the biggest news to come from Twitter in the past year, Periscope lets you broadcast yourself live on Twitter — and save the stream for viewing afterward (something Periscope’s competitor Meerkat doesn’t do).
Hubspot has a helpful article that gives 5 great tips on using Periscope for your next marketing campaign.
Twitter Cards
Twitter cards are a new way of embedding rich media into a tweet. Depending on the type of card, users can even interact with the media without leaving Twitter. This has tremendous implications for your marketing strategy!
Want to learn more? Check out Courtney Seiter’s fabulous article that tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about Twitter cards — including how to create a card, best practices and measuring your success. She even provides a link to a downloadable Twitter card cheat sheet.
Video
Periscope isn’t Twitter’s only video feature. In January, Twitter announced built-in 30-second videos that you can embed in your tweets. While brands had a hard time doing much with Vine, this is sure to open up all sorts of marketing opportunities. Read more about Twitter video at Quartz.
Tweets in Google Search Results
Twitter and Google announced in February that tweets would be appearing in Google search results. Google has listed tweets before, but what’s big about this deal is that Google now has access to Twitter’s full stream. Now your tweets have SEO implications.
Want to take advantage of this? HubSpot tells you how.
Private Messages from Anyone
Direct messages (DM) used to be a pain for reporters, celebrities and brands. To send a DM your recipient had to be following you. Now you can opt in to receiving private messages from anyone. It also means you can send DMs to people who aren’t following your brand (yet).
But what’s the best way to make use of this without being spammy? CMS Wire has some helpful DM guidelines every company should consider.
Group Messages
Chat is huge on social media, and Twitter’s native chat features have lagged behind other platforms for a while. So it’s not surprising that Twitter didn’t stop with one change to their DMs. In February, Twitter released group messaging. Now you can privately message up to 20 people at a time. Just click or tap the Message button and type in all the users you want to message.
We Are Social Media explores three ways to use this new feature in your marketing campaigns. And Forbes has a few ideas of their own on how businesses can use group messaging.
Quote Tweets
Ever try to retweet a tweet, only to end up with something like this?
MT @wholebraingroup Sign up 4 #INBOUND2015 w/ code AnnArborHUG15. chnc 2 win prizes incl VIP seat dur all keynts! http://wholebra.in/1GxlWqQ
Good news: your pain is over. With quoted tweets, you can embed a tweet AND add a comment of up to 116 characters. Pretty awesome, eh? Here’s a terrific breakdown of quoted retweets, with everything you’ll need to know.
Analytics
We’re all about analytics at The Whole Brain Group, so we’re excited about the analytics tool that Twitter introduced in July. You can monitor your engagements, assess paid promotions, see your highest performing tweets and learn about your followers. Marketing Land has a great post that gives you a helpful tour of the tool.
Quick Promote
If you’re a small or medium size business that’s using Twitter Ads, you’ll want to know about Quick Promote. It’s a fast and easy way to get your best content in front of more people. Just go to your analytics dashboard, select a tweet and choose your budget. Done and done.
You can find out more about Quick Promote at Twitter’s Small Business Blog.
Buy Button & Twitter Offers
Got an online store? Twitter’s new Buy button could be a big boost to your business. This new feature includes an image, description and link to your payment processor so users can make purchases directly from a tweet. It’s still being tested and slowly rolled out, but it sounds like the feature is pretty successful already. Woothemes talks about how the Buy button could revolutionize your business.
But that’s not all for retail. It looks like Twitter is serious about ecommerce, because they’ve also rolled out Twitter Offers. With Offers, you can create a special offer that users add to their debit or credit cards. They can then apply the offer to a purchase at your online or brick-and-mortar store. Check out Entrepreneur’s article for all the details.
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