Twitter marketing strategy for your Shopify store

1. How to Successfully Use Twitter Marketing for Your Shopify Store Twitter is a microblogging site and app combination that has 280 character-per-post limit. Due to the short post length being the norm, Twitter is often the source of rapid fire conversations on various topics and interests. It has 145 million active users sending over 500 million Tweets (posts) per day. That’s right, over half a billion Tweets every single day. That is a lot of traffic with potential to drown out your voice or bring engagement to your brand and Shopify store. Twitter marketing strategy for your Shopify store Making an impact on such a large platform requires clear goals that can be planned for and achieved with measurable steps and metrics. For your Shopify store, the primary objective is brand awareness and engagement that will lead to increased sales conversion. Driving traffic to your Shopify store implies an increased click through rate (CTR). So one of your first goals can be an increase in CTR from 1% to 1.5% over a 3-month period. Having decided what your ecommerce goals are on Twitter, develop an editorial calendar tailored for your target buyer personas. An editorial calendar is used to plan your posts ahead of time so that themes, media, tweet type and time are tailored for maximum audience engagement and conversion. Brand goals are well and good but remember that your Shopify store does not exist in a vacuum. It has competitors on Twitter who have been there longer. Running a competitor analysis with tools like Rival IQ helps frame your goals so that you can gauge what it takes to gain significant market share from them. Set up your profile for brand recognition Use knowledge acquired from competitor analysis and appreciation of your goals to put together an account that will give your Shopify store the most mileage on Twitter. There are a number of sections to pay attention to when building your profile. Twitterhandleanddisplayname

2. The handle is the username that appears at the end of the URL leading to your profile and is limited to 15 characters. It is therefore important that it is as close to your store or brand name as possible. When other users on Twitter are mentioning you with the ‘@’ symbol, the handle is what appears. This should change as little as possible for business accounts. The display name is what appears prominently on your profile above your handle. With a more relaxed character limit, the shortened handle name can be expanded to capture more about your brand. It is a more flexible identifier of your account and can be changed for marketing purposes, the handle will still lead to your profile. Profilebio Everything about your profile is searchable due to Twitter’s active search engine function. That means that your bio should be developed with two goals in mind, search engine optimization (SEO) and follower engagement. What goes into your brand’s Twitter bio can quantitatively increase your follower count before they even engage with your tweets. The bio is limited to 160 characters and should include the following details. Introduce the account to your audience and tailor the language to match the overall personality of your brand. Add keywords within your bio that are relevant to your niche but do so sparingly to avoid looking spammy. Including a call to action with a tracked link back to your Shopify store is a great way to maximize the accounts potential click through rate (CTR) and sales conversion. Twitter is a social site so don’t get too serious, add an emoji or two if they are appropriate for your brand. Profilephotoandheader The importance of your brand’s profile photo cannot be overstated because it appears next to every single tweet sent. Therefore, the most effective profile photo for your brand would be your logo or wordmark. It should be 400*400 pixels for a crisp look, though the minimum can be 200*200 pixels. Your profile header is great real estate for a quick product line up, upcoming events or general info about your brand that is better communicated in a photograph. The recommended dimensions are 1500*1500 pixels for a snug fit on any device it is viewed from without compromising any information you’ve included. Features of the platform

3. Even though the mobile first interphase appears simple, Twitter is rich with features that you can leverage to push your Shopify store farther and faster. Twitterfeed The Twitter feed is where all the action happens. It is a linear conveyor belt of all the tweets being sent by the accounts you follow as well as their retweets and likes. Depending on your settings, the Twitter algorithm will also plug in ads, trending tweets and tweets from topics that interest you. Lists Lists help to declutter the feed so that you can navigate content in a more organized and structured way. Basically, when accounts are added to a list, that becomes a mini feed with content only from those accounts. Any account can create lists and depending on the privacy settings, any other account can subscribe to those lists. Threads A tweet is limited to 280 characters. However, Twitter allows stringing tweets together to form a longer post called a thread. Thread length is only limited by the content you want to post. It’s a great way to tell a story and the division of tweets can be used as a vehicle to build hype if you post updates over time or as a mechanic to separate ideas in the thread. Hashtags Hashtags are a great way to get traction by jumping onto an already trending topic and driving users to your account and Shopify store. They can also be used to help curate different content coming from your account. For example, #BlackFriday vs #employeetakeover are hashtags with different content structures with the former jumping on a popular annual shopping spree while the other is more personal to a brand and be one off. Pinnedtweets These are tweets that are placed at the top of the feed on your profile. They are great for maintaining the visibility of a tweet on your profile to highlight things like time limited offers and boost their engagement. If such tweets contain tracked links, the increased visibility and engagement can lead to higher CTR. Content curation and creation for high engagement Leveraging the mentioned app features and others to create high engagement content is the goal. Using the editorial calendar effectively means your account will send tweets at the right time to come up on your target audience’s feed consistently. The frequency must be enough to get noticed by not too much to warrant getting muted. Use as much media as you can because Twitter has powerful integration of photos, gifs, videos, article links, file links and more as in an easy to use interface. Twitter’s direct message feature (more commonly called DM’s) allows users to send semi-private messages to other accounts. This a great avenue for providing customer support as the communication can be escalated from a complaint tweet or follow-up on a product query.

4. Automation and business account management tools such as If This Then That (IFTTT), TweetDeck and Hootsuite are useful for managing your editorial calendar. These tools provide a lot of functionality beyond the basic Twitter interface such as trigger-action sequences, scheduling, keyword search and metrics analysis among others. TweetDeck is provided free, Hootsuite pricing starts at $29 per month for single users and IFTTT $199 per year for their developer tier. Run Twitter ads Twitter ads are some of the most engaging on social media because of the way they are presented to users. Ads are only differentiated from ‘ordinary’ tweets by a small caption in the bottom left corner reading, ‘Promoted’. Otherwise, they are served in a non-invasive way in your feed. Promoted tweets appear on trends page and search results. Serving ads as tweets creates a situation where a well-crafted ad can have very high engagement and thus ROI because they tend to be more expensive than ads on other platforms. They are priced on a Pay Per Follow (PPF) model where you only pay for ads that receive clicks, follows, shares, comments or favorites. Bidding usually begins at $0.2 and can go up to $5 PPF (which is quite a lot) depending on your targeting preferences. Work with influencers market your Shopify store Hashtags that are specific to your niche or product range are a great way to identify influencers (accounts with large followings) within your industry. There are two types of influencers; micro influencers who have small but dedicated followers and macro influencers who have very large and varied followers. Both kinds of influencer bring important benefits to a working relationship. Micro influencers have highly engaged followers that can lead to quick conversions while macro influencers provide wide reach and impressions to the point that they can get your branded hashtags trending.