Using Twitter to Grow an Organic Audience – Social Media Explorer

New businesses often face a huge dilemma: how to advertise their products while keeping their marketing budget low. Good advertising, especially in this digital age, needs to be longterm and across multiple platforms to be successful. However, new companies trying to raise awareness about their products often face massive competition from more established brands with huge advertising budgets.

Most new companies will opt to pay for ads on Facebook and Instagram. The pricing for these tends to appeal to small companies as you can regulate costs based on reach. Additionally, they can set an advertising cap, so you stay within budget. However, it is quite rare to find small companies marketing on Twitter, yet this is one of the free best marketing platforms there is.

Twitter vs. Instagram

When using social media platforms to increase reach, it’s crucial to understand how different platforms manage interactions. Twitter is built on a many-to-many network model, while platforms such as Instagram are based on a one-to-many model. The distinction between the two is how information spreads. With Twitter, the same tweet can be sent out by multiple accounts to other users using the retweet function. 

Instagram relies on the one-to-many model, which means that information spreads from a single user to their followers. Understanding how Twitter works will help you when curating and posting content that drives audience engagement. While on Instagram, you can rely primarily on catchy photos, Twitter engagement is entirely different. It will require a combination of good storytelling skills, a dash of humor, and relatability. 

Twitter and Good Brand Stories

Customers don’t buy products – they buy into ideas. With the number of new products that come into the market each hour, it can be difficult for people to choose. It has increasingly dawned on marketing gurus that the solution to this problem is not improving products but the stories behind them. A compelling story can improve brand loyalty as well as improve sales conversions. 

Twitter has a 280-character post limit. That may seem restrictive but used well, can provide just the right set-up to sell your brand story. You can curate your timeline to offer informative and exciting tweets in your industry. It’s crucial to provide accurate information so you can establish yourself as an authority. If the information is timely and relevant to the public, it is more likely to gain retweets. This way, your brand grows organically beyond your initial followers.

A Little Humour Goes a Long Way

Unless you are a modern-day Flintstone, you’ve come across and probably laughed at a few memes. The term ‘meme’ was coined in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to mean an idea that spreads quickly between people. In the modern sense, it denotes a relatable image with a funny caption that has gone ‘viral.’ Using memes in your business may seem like a risky idea, but you want to be sure people are laughing with you, not at you.

However, it is true that wit and charm work magic not only in making you more memorable but also likable. Additionally, most of the posts that go viral on Twitter tend to appeal to people’s sense of humor. To create witty posts, be sure that the humor is not offensive, that it’s in good taste, and complements your brand. You can choose to commission an animated video or even a short comic strip to aid in this. In this case, creativity is your friend.

Bet on an Organic Audience

As a growing business, your best bet for outlasting the competition is building an organic audience. These are customers that interact with and trust your brand. Eventually, they will be the ones who refer you to their personal and business networks. It may seem impossible when you start, but Twitter can be the key to creating an active and thriving business community.