This guest post is written by Ricardo Fayet, Co-founder of Reedsy, an online marketplace that enables authors to work with the best editorial and design talent out there.
Everything happens on Twitter. It’s often the first place you learn about a newsworthy event, before the media even reports it. With over 300M users worldwide, and over 500M tweets exchanged every day, Twitter presents a unique landscape for startups to find, engage and convert their customers.
At a recent Seedcamp Academy session, Lorna Brady and Brian Lavery from Twitter’s Small Business Marketing team gave a great presentation on how to harness the opportunities that the social network offers. Here are a few key points I drew from talking to them and from my Twitter experiences with Reedsy so far.
Compared to other social networks like Facebook or Linkedin, Twitter allows your content (tweets) to reach a very wide following and create a high number of impressions. This means that, whatever your click-through rate is on those tweets, your “brand” is going to be more visible on Twitter and reach more users organically.
If they click through to your Twitter profile, make sure you have:
Bonus points:
This last one is a bit tricky, but can be incredibly powerful. Our Reedsy pinned twitter card has been retweeted almost 100 times now! To learn more about which card is right for you and how to set it up, you can read Twitter’s comprehensive documentation page here.
Once you’ve taken care of all the “static” metadata of your Twitter page, it’s time to think about your “feed” (i.e. what you’re going to be tweeting about). Twitter recommends keeping an 80/20 ratio of engaging content vs direct offers. It’s important that your feed doesn’t show the same tweet repeated, but rather a mixture of resources, images, news about your product, etc.
Getting more followers can seem daunting, because most startups think, “how can I reach more potential customers through Twitter?” And finding new customers, as we all know, is not easy.
That said, there is a very simple way to grow your Twitter following: connecting with existing customers — whether you found them online or offline — on Twitter. Here are a few things you can do to make that happen:
Bonus: If your “Twitter sharer” seems to be working (i.e. a good percentage of users use it after signing up), make sure you optimize it! You can, for example, make sure it creates a Twitter card within their tweet, or shares a nice branded image. Moreover, make sure that after tweeting it, the user gets a little window prompting them to follow you on Twitter.
Of course, depending on your marketing channels and strategies, there are a lot of other things you can do. At Reedsy, we love content marketing and we find it effective to include a sentence at the end of every post asking our readers to follow us on Twitter. We also include a couple of “Click To Tweets” that make it easier to share the best bits, as you can see in this post!
If your startup creates or sells physical products, there are a number of creative things you can do, like including your handle directly on the packaging!
Getting your existing customers to follow and tweet about you is the best way to reach new potential customers on Twitter. That said, you can be proactive by using hashtags and Twitter advanced search to find and interact with people who’d potentially be interested in your product.
If you know your industry well, you are usually aware of the hashtags your customers like to use. In tech for example: #growthhacking #startup #fundraising or #tech are very popular hashtags. By including them in your tweets, you will reach more people than just your followers. You can also check their feed regularly and interact with other users using them (in a non-spammy way, of course).
Twitter advanced search is another powerful way to find users who match certain interests, based on what they tweet, what hashtags they use, what their blurb is, etc. It allows for a level of granularity that can be particularly useful to find early adopters or beta-testers for your product. It can also be used to find all the major “influencers” in your industry. Here’s a good article by Social Media Examiner about how to use the Twitter advanced search form.
Once you’ve built a solid presence on Twitter — and if that presence starts bringing you leads and conversions — then you should start experimenting with Twitter ads. As with any other form of advertising, it is easy to pour money down the drain without seeing any results. This is why you should first do a bit of research on Twitter’s advertising platform and then define a strategy:
Whatever assumptions you make for these questions, test them. Twitter has a very helpful analytics platform that you should monitor daily both for your organic and paid activity. If you don’t know where to start, though, here are some insights into what usually works best.
The most popular kind of advertising on Twitter for startups is the conversion-based one. It requires you to add a “pixel” (tracker) to your website to keep track of conversions. If you have a complex conversion funnel, make sure you place that pixel in the right place: not so far down the funnel that Twitter won’t be able to optimize on it, but also not so far up that your conversions won’t actually mean anything. For most startups, the “sign up complete” page should be a safe bet to start testing.
Hashtags can be very powerful for targeting, but another popular tactic is to target users interested in competitors. This works particularly well if you have a strong differentiation factor that you can sum up in a few characters.
There are lots of things to test here, but whatever you test, make sure your advertised tweets includes either a strong image or a Twitter card. Embedded videos (through Twitter cards) are also definitely worth a test!
The next thing we’re going to test at Reedsy is our “virtual” presence through a conference/trade show using Twitter advertising. Trade shows are expensive to sponsor and competition for visibility is always fierce.
Luckily, these conferences (especially in the tech industry) have very active hashtags and encourage all attendees to tweet heavily. That’s why it can be a good idea to skip a conference and “hijack” it instead through Twitter ads. You’ll just need to set up a campaign targeting the hashtag during the days of the conference with a couple of sponsored tweets. This way, every time an attendee checks the hashtag feed of the conference, they will see your sponsored tweet sitting on top of the feed. This can give you much more visibility than a stand at the conference or a swag insert in attendee bags.
Of course, it’s possible that you won’t be the only company doing it. And it’s equally possible that the hashtag won’t be active, but it’s certainly worth testing since this is significantly cheaper than attending in person or sending someone.
Every Twitter user experience is different. Some things work better for companies while others have to find new methods of gaining social media traffic, so don’t hesitate to share what has (or hasn’t) worked for you in the comments below!
We are very happy to announce that Antavo, the London based, Seedcamp-backed startup has just raised 6-figure round from iEurope Capital LLC, a premier VC fund, and Zoltan Vardy, a business angel.
Antavo is a web-based marketing software that enables e-commerce and retail brands to effectively interact with their customers. They’ve recently released a point-based loyalty programme that helps online retailers to increase the recency, frequency, and monetary value of their clients’ spend.
Currently operating in the UK, with offices and partners across Europe and Asia, Antavo plans to use this investment to strengthen the team and consolidate its presence across Europe.
Antavo became a Seedcamp-backed company back in 2012, one of a growing number of startups in the Seedcamp family clustered in the Ad-tech sector.
Head over to their website!
We are very happy to announce that FishBrain, the Swedish Seedcamp-backed “Facebook for Fishing” startup has recently closed a $8million (£5.1 million) round of funding from Northzone, Spotify’s biggest external stakeholder.
FishBrain is a social network and an app for the world’s biggest hobby – recreational fishing.
Their vision is to create an online community of fishing amateurs and, through the use of their data, provide tips and suggestions on how to get the best catch. Currently operating in Sweden, the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, FishBrain is planning to consolidate its presence in North America and Japan where fishing is one of the most common outdoor activity and has a long rooted tradition.
As Seedcamp’s Sia Houachingna remarks,“The angling market is huge and still is a massive untapped opportunity online. FishBrain is creating a community for millions of fishing enthusiasts. But what makes it truly unique, is that thanks to the massive amount of data they have already collected, FishBrain can now suggest to fishermen the best spots around them to get their dream catch at anytime.”
FishBrain became a Seedcamp-backed company back in February 2013, and we’re thrilled to see them expand its presence with this new funding.
Head over to their website!
We are very happy to announce that We Are Colony, the London-based, Seedcamp-backed streaming startup has just closed a $2million (£1.3 million) round of seed funding from New York media VC fund Archer Gray, UK fund Firestartr, Essex Innovation, and several angel investors. We Are Colony, the Netflix of behind-the-scenes film footage, engages passionate fans through ‘special edition’ digital releases, making available feature films with a bundle of exclusive additional and behind-the-scenes content. We Are Colony revolutionizes movie lover’s experience. The film is only half the story. Fans are exposed to add-on-exclusive content that ranges from deleted scenes, production diaries, extended scenes all the way through to things like scripts, story boards, stills, etc.
We Are Colony became a Seedcamp-backed company back in February 2014, and we’re thrilled to see them expand their service with this new funding.
Head over to their website to explore We Are Colony and get behind the scenes.
We are very happy to announce that Revolut, the London-based, Seedcamp-backed startup has just raised $2.3 million (£1.5 million) from Balderton Capital.
Revolut’s vision is to disrupt the financial industry and make international finance truly fair, cutting hidden banking costs to zero. Revolut’s beautifully designed mobile app allows users to exchange money at interbank rates with just a touch of a button and spend it with a multi-currency card that’s accepted everywhere!
Revolut became a Seedcamp-backed company back in February 2015, one of a growing number of startups in the Seedcamp family clustered in the Fintech sector.
“Revolut solves a real problem that we experience as we travel across Europe to look for the best founders to back”, points out Seedcamp’s Sia Houchangnia, “We’re excited that with this new investment, more people will be able to spend money across the globe with zero fees.”
The Revolut team has just announced the release of their free mobile app and prepaid MasterCard. Read how it works here and head over to their website to explore Revolut and download the app!
Big Congrats to The Revolut Team!
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