Category Mobile Apps

We wrote a previous article extolling the advantages of potential Twitter campaigns. Elon Musk recently threw a bit of a curveball to digital marketers by rebranding the Twitter platform to X. Is Twitter/X still a worthwhile place to run campaigns and find quality prospects? We believe it is.

Twitter’s decision to rebrand itself as X has generated mixed reactions within the digital marketing community. While rebranding can be a strategic move to revitalise a company’s image and appeal to a broader audience, it can also alienate existing users who are familiar with the original brand. The success of this rebranding effort will depend on how well X communicates its new identity and whether it manages to retain its loyal user base during the transition.

So far the rebranding hasn’t been very popular among the populous. App Store users began downrating the app. Influencers are complaining of loss of subscriber blowback. The switch hasn’t been smooth. So far it’s been anything but illuminating for marketers looking to understand what Musk’s plans are for his platform business. In fact, this most recent move has achieved quite the opposite effect, leaving advertisers feeling uncertain and unconvinced.

Facebook’s rebrand to Meta hasn’t been popular either, especially in the wake of the near complete failure of the metaverse. X could suffer a similar fate, especially since users aren’t even sure what to call their activity on the platform anymore. Is it tweeting? Is it X-ing? Nobody knows and it just doesn’t feel right.

However, X’s effort to eliminate bots, fake traffic, fake accounts, and the like, is a still a huge boon for marketers. Even if there is rebranding blowback, digital marketers can at least rest assured that audiences they target on the platform are more likely comprised of real prospects and that the data available to market to those prospects is genuine.

In the whirlwind of its massive changes over the last two years, in ownership, in staff, and in policy, marketers have been cautious in re-embracing Twitter on behalf of their clients. However, Elon Musk’s cleanup of the company including the wipeout of fake accounts, bot accounts, and other unsavory types of accounts that drain marketing dollars. This new move toward authenticity in the system is a potential goldmine for marketing purposes so we thought it a good time to revisit some of the top ways to tap into Twitter for marketing purposes.

Twitter boasts more than 217 million active daily users making the social media platform an important piece of your marketing strategy. Not only does the microblogging site have a significant user base, but Twitter is also the world’s seventh most popular network and is expected to grow to over 340 million active users by 2024.

But with 350,000 tweets sent per minute and 500 million tweets sent daily, you need to be strategic and savvy to win (and hold) your audience’s attention and achieve your Twitter marketing goals.

Set Goals

Success on any social media platform begins with having clear, measurable goals. There’s no way to know if your strategy positively impacts your business unless you understand what you’re trying to achieve.

You want to create SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. So “going viral” doesn’t count. These goals should align with your high-level business objectives and be broken down into measurable indicators of success.

For example, you may want to drive more traffic to your website. Translate that into a SMART goal by aiming to increase your average click-through rate. You can use your baseline click-through rate from your Twitter audit to set a specific achievable goal over a reasonable period of time (say, an increase from 1.5% to 2.5% in three months).

Check Out the Competition

You know what they say… keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

While it might feel sneaky, don’t forget to review the Twitter accounts of your industry competitors. Analyzing their social media can help you refine your own by revealing weaknesses or gaps in their strategy and ways that you can distinguish yourself.

If you want to be super savvy, create a private Twitter List of your competitors so you can see what they’re tweeting and discussing in real time.

Make a Content Calendar

Planning your content takes a little bit of time upfront but ultimately saves you effort and stress later on. Trust us. You’ll be glad you did it when you’re not struggling to develop a witty, original tweet for #NationalDoughnutDay at the last minute.

A social media content calendar helps align the content you’re posting on all your channels and spot possible gaps and conflicts that you can address. It also helps you plan ahead and seize opportunities for timely or interesting content, like sharing your sustainability practices on Earth Day or celebrating your female founder on International Women’s Day.

When creating your calendar, consider:

• How often you want to post
• The best times to post
• Who should approve posts

A calendar can also help you assess your content and see if you’re sharing a balanced mix of tweets. You want to follow the rule of thirds (number 8 on this list): ⅓ of tweets promote your business, ⅓ share personal stories, and ⅓ are informative insights from experts or influencers.

However, you can’t set it and forget it. You still need to keep an eye on your Twitter account so you can reply to DMs and mentions and join conversations.

Everyone is familiar with the recent assault on TikTok in Congressional hearings within the United States. This assault has created some doubt on how much one can rely on the platform for future marketing efforts. Influencers are being threatened as well as companies who promote their offerings to the multitude of users. Already a large swath of government workers are no longer permitted access to the app on their government issued devices.

Between the most recent news that TikTok executives can choose which posts go viral using the platform’s heating feature, and the ticking time bomb in the shape of potential TikTok bans on both sides of the Atlantic, the sheen could well be fading on the well-polished narrative around the short-form video app. But as always, when it comes to TikTok, marketers seem unfazed and continue to be enthralled by the platform.

With that said, it’s never a good look for any platform when the feature that supposedly makes it special is called into question.

“On its own, the revelation [of TikTok’s heating feature] isn’t likely to cause much upheaval, but it certainly isn’t great optics,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at eMarketer. “It’s also the first in a series of dominoes that will fall for TikTok this year, as the app will likely have to make some major concessions to appease U.S. regulators.”

But the idea that even a small number of TikTok employees can manually push content to users suggests there’s more going on behind closed doors — and it feels somewhat murky.

Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders, explained that TikTok execs’ use of heating (which is boosting videos into users’ “For You” pages to achieve a more ideal number of views), confirms the TikTok team’s awareness of some of the drawbacks of having a very aggressive personalization engine — its lauded special algorithm — and so this is a way for them to account for those drawbacks in some way.

“The heating feature highlights that it’s not as perfect a system as ‘good content will always win,’ but I don’t think many marketers are naïve enough to believe that money wouldn’t play a part eventually,” added Matt Moorut, director analyst at the Gartner for Marketing Leaders practice.

After all, it was always expected that TikTok would give its closest partners the opportunity for a leg-up, such as by giving previews of upcoming products or, in this case, boosting videos, noted MacEwan.

And in the grand scheme of things, this heating tool is still only a small part of total views on the app (though specific numbers have yet to be confirmed), so it’s unlikely to impact marketers’ organic content.

But with a snafu like this coming to light, the credibility behind TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t feel as solid as it once was. Talk of banning the app from political circles, on university campuses and potentially entire countries only fuels those underlying concerns.

In fact, regulation is the real existential threat for TikTok, more so than this viral pushing by staff,  according to MacEwan. As such, this news is unlikely to create any new TikTok skeptics among lawmakers or convince them TikTok has crossed a line in any way.

“Of course, that could change if it turned out TikTok staff had been promoting problematic content or upholding editorial lines relayed by managers in Beijing, which might involve heating or other tools,” he added. 

From the outset, it appears marketers have had a higher level of skepticism for TikTok than other social platforms. But according to Moorut, that’s largely because the app can supposedly provide incredible viewership but still hasn’t managed to build analytics to truly trace that through to conversions in the same ways as other platforms.

Yet despite those flaws, which have yet to be ironed out, TikTok will likely see this latest issue as nothing more than a bump on the road to greater monetization opportunities. But as a scaling short-form video app, it still has a long way to go until the platform works for regulators, policy makers, brands, creators and consumers. 

“Until there’s a radical shift in the regulatory environment or a truly massive scandal, I don’t see the compounding dissatisfaction affecting the fact that this will be an important channel for both brands and creators,” Moorut said.

Expect to see and hear more of TikTok and its influencers in the future.