If you’re looking to make an impact on X (formerly Twitter) and get more sales for your startup, then you’re going to want to learn X marketing tactics and strategies to grow your business.
X is one of the most popular marketing channels to build a relevant audience of followers, easily engage with your target audience(s) and generate leads for your startup or business.
This is a guide to X (Twitter) marketing best practices and contains X (Twitter) marketing strategies and tactics to help you build an awesome X account with thousands of followers.
These best practices will enable you to drive a considerable amount of traffic to your website.
1) Create an X Profile Worth Visiting
Your X profile is a very important part of a cohesive X strategy. Do it right if you want to get followers and become an influencer in your industry. Do your best to follow the guidelines below so you can drive traffic back to your site from your profile.
1) Banner
If you don’t already have a banner, you should create a banner for your profile that quickly describes your service/product, lists your website and social profile URLs, and even a great testimonial on there could go a long way.
Ideally, you want it to look graphically nice. The more presentable and professional it looks, the more your brand authority will increase.
Quotes are okay to put on there as well if they’re highly relevant.
Check out Canva and you can make your own X banner for free.
2) Profile Photo
You want to have a good profile photo of yourself or of your business logo.
It should definitely be high quality and not grainy at all. If it’s a personal photo, SMILE with your eyes and teeth.
Some startups also like to have group shots of them as their default picture, but it’s advised to stick with your company logo. The dimensions are 400×400.
3) Profile Description
Create a searchable bio using keywords, yet simultaneously boiling down your startup into a sentence or two in its simplest explanation.
Don’t use hashtags in your profile description.
Hashtags are for conversations and your company description isn’t one.
Moreover, hashtags take people away from your profile when they click on them. The words in your profile’s description are discoverable by X’s search algorithm, anyway.
4) Pinned Tweets
The best practice here is to pin your top tweet to the top of your profile. But your top tweet should also be the most relevant to your target audience. Usually, the best one has the lead magnet of your free e-book or guide on it so they’ll sign up to your email list.
Pin a poll on your profile and for one week out of the month, you can conduct surveys/polls & hashtag them to broaden your outreach. Polls only last for a maximum of 7 days.
It’s suggested to conduct polls only when your profile is generating thousands of visits per month.
You can see the number of profile visits you’re achieving by left-clicking the icon on the top menu bar once and selecting the analytics page.
You can find the polling option when you click on the icon to create a new tweet. It will be on the bottom of the popup.
2) Tweeting
The tweets that work the best are tweets that add value to the end-user.
While conversations via replies on X are good, content marketing content is one of the most effective for methods of marketing your business and enhancing the reputation of your brand.
1) Types of Tweets
- Video (gets the most impressions)
- Images with text on them (also gets a lot of impressions)
- X has a 2:1 width: length ratio for images at a minimum of 200 x 100px, but most people create or add larger images.
- Text with URLs to your content (medium efficacy)
- GIFs
- Regular text (this has the smallest impact in impressions).
- Retweets
You should be mixing it up with all the different types of tweets for an optimal strategy.
2) Types of Content
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Memes
- Picture Quotes
- Video
- Podcasts
- Lists
- Cheat sheets
- Discounts/Sales
3) Characteristics of Content to Share
- Entertaining
- Interesting
- Educational
- Inspirational
- Motivational
- Insightful
- Helpful
- Useful
- Funny
4) Thanking Followers for Following You
Thanking followers by tweet is extremely effective in increasing social proof, brand recognition for you, and brings in key influencers that will follow you…if you do it right.
It’s nice to feel appreciated, isn’t it?
Luckily for you, I have one of the best strategies to thank new followers which will drive in tons of new followers as long as you do it regularly.
This selfless technique also makes others want to follow you and engage with you so that you can personally thank them and advertise what they’re doing!
If these followers have large followings, then this strategy below will have astronomically higher value for you.
Follower Thanking Formula
Greet them, use their name and thank them for following, then say something complimentary about their X profile, tweets, website, service, etc. including the link (if there is one), then use relevant hashtags at the end of the tweet.
Here’s an example of what a thanking tweet could look like with a shameless self-promotion:
Example:
Hey Carl @CarlPotak thanks for following me. Love how StartupDevKit.com is helping #startups start and grow from idea to scaling company! #Entrepreneur #Founder #LeanStartup
This tweeting formula is an amazing way to start a X account and get lots of followers.
The more you do it, the more exponentially you’ll grow your existing account. It is incredibly selfless and extremely promotional at the same time without you having to promote your service/startup once. It shows your good will when you’re essentially marketing someone else’s brand.
However, there’s going to be a point where so many people will follow you per day that you can’t individually thank every single one of them.
In that case, you should pick and choose the followers who are most relevant to your target niche.
Since your tweets stay in your account forever, unless you delete them, you will see that over the course of months that these tweets become increasingly relevant due to the nature of hashtag searches and aid to your account growing quicker.
Also, when you don’t immediately mention the X profile but greet first, the tweets go to a larger audience rather than just mentioning that user directly, which will decrease the impressions that tweet will get.
Mass Thanking Tweeting Strategy
When you’re in the position of having too many people to individually thank for following you per day, then you might also want to employ a mass thanking tweeting strategy.
It’s pretty simple and goes like this:
Thank you for following us @name @name @name @name @name @name @name @name @name and have an amazing day! #hashtag1 #hashtag2 #hashtag3
5) Consistency is Key – Tweet Everyday
Tweet consistently because consistency is the key to your success on X.
The best practice is to spread out your tweets throughout the day to get maximum efficacy, however, you’ll want to plan out your tweets so that the most important ones are between 12 PM – 2 PM, 5 PM, and 8 PM – 10 PM.
However, it’s important to combine tweets of your own, whether it’s original content, other people’s content that you tweet out, or retweeting content on X.
Ideally, you should be doing between 8 and 80 tweets a day. But the more you decide to tweet per day, the more challenging it becomes to introduce new content into the mix.
However, you tend to get incredible amounts of engagement the more you tweet per day.
Retweeting content from your followers and content relevant to your followers can help you achieve your goals.
In addition, people actually like reading content on weekends during the early afternoon and Sunday evenings as well.
Your consistency creates increased authority and thus will bring in leads and sales.
Essentially, you’re leading by example.
6) Hashtags
You want to use 10 to 20 hashtags that are most relevant towards your company’s target market. But not at the same time. That would be overkill!!
Then, save those hashtags in a document for you to open repeatedly when planning posts and for when you’re actively on X.
Since you can’t use them all at once, you should pick between two and four hashtags to put into each tweet.
It’s important to use hashtags that are highly relevant to the content you’re posting and to the audience(s) that would want to know about that content.
3) Where to Find Content
- One way to find content to market is via Post Planner. It’s a great service that finds the best, most relevant content for your target audience and provides recommendations to you.
- Google Newsfeeds by topic
- RSS Feeds from your favorite blogs
- Podcast episode lists from your favorite shows
- Your favorite Youtube episodes on a relevant topic to your target audience
- Relevant quotes found through search engines
- Make your own content
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Blog Posts
- Infographics
- Quotes
- Stories
4) Planning & Scheduling Your Content Via Automation
Take it a step further to automate and schedule your tweets using Lately AI, Hootsuite, Buffer, SproutSocial, AgoraPulse, Post Planner, or Social Oomph among many others.
Your consistency will create authority.
It’s said that half of the battle in life is showing up.
In this case, tweeting is showing up.
Moreover, you show up by planning and automating your X marketing with social media management services.
Below you will see descriptions with links to three of the top social media marketing and automation services:
1) Hootsuite is a favorite of many.
It offers a good free option that allows you to connect up to 3 social media accounts and schedule your tweets. However, its plans are incredibly expensive.
2) Buffer is really good, inexpensive, and very popular.
You can connect up to one social profile per platform for free and allows you to schedule up to 10 posts per social profile in advance and you can have up to five social profiles connected. I especially love the Buffer chrome extension that allows you to curate content that you find while you’re reading it.
3) Sprout Social is another powerful social media management software suite.
Its pricing is a bit lofty but has a very nice set of features.
While Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to have a free forever option, Sprout Social does not.
However, you can get a free 30 day trial for any of the paid options with no credit card required.
5) X Following and Followers
For X marketing, one of the best ways to get more followers is to follow back new followers.
Find between 20 and 50 accounts worth following (within your target niche) and follow them every day.
If they don’t follow you back within two to three days, then unfollow them and repeat this process. You can use a tool to help you achieve this like crowdfire or tweepi and can find other similar tools here. This way, it’ll be easier to keep track of who you’ve recently followed, who followed you back, and who didn’t.
By steadily following users every day, you’ll be able to expand your reach with your tweets, get more engagement, and build an even bigger following. The results compound on themselves, so don’t give up if you don’t get results early on. It takes patience and commitment.
6) Social Listening
Retweet & like the good content of followers and non-followers which you find by social listening (via your stream & by searches).
This is a great way for you to engage with your followers and stay on their radars.
Create and use X lists of yours and others’ to identify more relevant leads / new followers, as well as your favorite existing followers. It allows you to do more targeted social listening.
X lists are kind of like your regular X feed but it’s even better for X marketing because it can be much more targeted towards specific types of users.
Subscribe to lists of other’s that you like. When you do this you’ll be able to see the most recent tweets of the people on that X list.
7) Interacting with the Community is a fantastic X marketing strategy
Commenting
When you comment on very popular or trending tweets, and say something useful and/or insightful, then you’re going to start to generate followers and traffic to your profile. This will jumpstart the algorithm to start to show your account to other similar users who engaged with your comment.
Mentioning
Mention users using “@username” and tell them how great you think their articles/posts are and add in some relevant hashtags.
Mentioning users on X is important because it directly engages with that user.
Engagement on X means more visibility and more traffic coming to your profile, which, in turn, will lead to more clicks on your website URL listed in your profile and more clicks on your pinned tweet, which should include an outbound link going to your website.
Direct Messages
The best practice for this is to use direct messages for lead generation and relationship-building.
Try not to be too overly promotional.
Build connections with these individuals and talk like a regular person when messaging others.
Authenticity is better than sounding “overly professional” but you do want to still show that you’re an authority on your subject matter.
It’s pretty common to have an automated direct message, however.
Automated direct messages are great for sharing more of your company info, but they often won’t get the results that you want.
Most people don’t even read their automated messages because it’s spammy and especially if they’re long.
X Spaces
Join and create X spaces to get in on conversations about specific topics or create your own via voice.
They’ve made it like Clubhouse. Conversations in spaces are a great X marketing tactic that can help you build a more genuine audience.
Replies
Replies are a great way to keep the “social” in social media marketing and X marketing in general, as it’s a completely public site. If you touch upon an engaging topic, people will be much more likely to reply. Add a picture in your tweet and you’ll increase your chances of a reply too.
8) Formerly Twitter Blue, now X Premium
X Premium is a paid service you can sign up for through X. They made it so that it increases your reach with your X marketing and also verifies your account so you’ll get that blue checkmark badge next to your account name. It does a whole lot more than that, though. It’s $8/month right now or $72/year.
As of the time this was written, they offer the following with X Premium:
The following is verbatim from X’s website.
Features available to every Premium tier:
- Edit post: This highly requested feature gives you a 1 hour window to make a limited number of changes to published posts. Use it to make updates, tag someone, or reorder the media you attached. Edit post currently only applies to original posts and quotes.
- Longer posts: Want to post more than 280 characters? Longer posts allow subscribers to post up to 25,000 characters. You can also compose longer posts in a quote or reply. Standard functionality like posting media, creating polls, and using hashtags still apply. Everyone will be able to read longer posts, but only Premium subscribers can create them.
- Longer video uploads: Share more content with your followers. Premium subscribers can upload videos up to ~3 hours long and up to 8GB file size (1080p) (on x.com and X for iOS only).
- Create a Community: As a Premium subscriber, you can create a community on X to connect with people who share similar interests.
Features available only to Premium and Premium+ tiers:
- Blue checkmark: Get verified with a blue checkmark next to your name. The blue checkmark will appear on eligible profiles after a review to ensure subscribed accounts meet all eligibility criteria.
- Ads Revenue Sharing: Receive a share of the revenue generated from verified accounts’ organic impressions of ads displayed in the replies of content you post on X. Subject to eligibility requirements. See the “Monetization” tab on x.com or the mobile app for more details.
- Creator Subscriptions: Earn a living on X by letting anyone subscribe to you for monthly content. Subject to eligibility requirements. See the “Monetization” tab on x.com or the mobile app for more details.
- Premium gifting: As an X Premium subscriber, you can gift X Premium or Premium+ to anyone who isn’t yet subscribed – as a little treat. Learn more about Premium gifting here.
- Ads in For You and Following Timelines
- Reduced ads in For You and Following Timelines: Premium tier subscribers see approximately 50% fewer ads in the For You and Following Timelines. As you scroll, you will see approximately twice as many organic or non-promoted posts placed in between promoted posts or ads. There may be times when there are more or fewer non-promoted posts between promoted posts. The reduced ads feature does not apply to promoted content elsewhere on X, including but not limited to ads on profiles, ads in post replies, Amplify Video ads, promoted events in Explore, promoted trends, and promoted accounts to follow.
- No ads in For You and Following Timelines: Premium+ tier subscribers see no ads in the For You and Following Timelines. This feature does not apply to promoted content elsewhere on X, including but not limited to ads on profiles, ads in post replies, ads in Immersive Media Viewer, promoted events in Explore, promoted trends, and promoted accounts to follow.
- Premium and Premium+ subscribers will have access to this feature after their account has been reviewed for eligibility and the blue checkmark has been applied.
- Reply to verified-only posts: Once verified, accounts can reply to posts which are limited to replies from verified accounts only.
- ID Verification: Verify your account by providing a government-issued ID to protect your account against impersonation. Receive an “ID verified” label on your profile.
- Access to Media Studio: Manage the images and videos you’ve uploaded to X with studio.x.com. Learn more about Media Studio. This feature is not available to Basic tier subscribers.
- Access to X Pro: View multiple configurable timelines simultaneously which can refresh in realtime, advanced search, add contributors and admins to your account, and more with X Pro.
- Access to Articles: Articles is a new way to share long form written content on X. Publishing Articles is a feature limited to Premium+ subscribers.
*Not all features available on all platforms and locations. Premium features may change periodically/from time to time as we keep improving the service.
This new paid service will definitely help your company’s influence grow quicker on Twitter — as long as you use its features!
9) NEVER BUY FOLLOWERS
This may seem like a good idea because it instantly boosts your followers to make you look like you’re already super popular. But this will, in fact, hurt your X (Twitter) marketing presence, because those “followers” will not be engaging with your tweets at all. Rather, they’re as good as useless and are dead weight on your account.
Doing things the hard way is…never easy – and there are no shortcuts for actual growth and establishing relationships with your followers.
It’s a lot better to see a lot of engagement with fewer followers than no engagement with a ton of followers. You would look quite lame to be tweeting and getting no engagement with 5k or 10k+ fake followers.
Conclusion
Here’s a TLDR summary of X marketing best practices:
- Create and use a good looking banner
- Have a high-quality profile picture
- Write a great profile description
- Pin your best, most relevant tweet
- Mix up your tweets with video, podcasts, articles, retweets, likes, replies, GIFs, quotes, and motivational.
- Automate and schedule your tweets
- Perform social listening and share content from your followers and industry-relevant subjects
- Thank followers for following you
- Interact and engage with folks on Twitter
Want some more awesome social media marketing strategies and tips? Yes? Check out 14 Startup Social Media Marketing Strategies To Gain Customers. This guide will help you successfully do social media marketing on pretty much any platform.
