Got Twitter? 8 expert tips to help you market your business better

Twitter rebranded to X back in 2023, and the domain fully moved from twitter.com to x.com in 2024. “Tweets” are now officially “posts” and “retweets” are “reposts,” though plenty of people (and even X's own marketing) still say “Twitter” and “tweet” out of habit. We’ll use X and Twitter somewhat interchangeably here since both terms are in everyday use.

While X is a powerful social media platform, it’s easy for your business to get lost in the “noise.”

But it’s worth cutting through and getting your message heard. It’s important to stand out.

About 79 percent of X users follow at least one brand on the platform. That said, the landscape has shifted since the rebrand: content moderation policies have loosened considerably, and a growing share of B2B brands have scaled back their posting frequency or paused X entirely over brand-safety concerns. Neither trend means you should avoid the platform, but it's worth weighing against your own audience and risk tolerance before investing heavily.

Dig deeper into the challenges and opportunities of X for your business.

The following are eight expert tips to help you market your business more effectively on X.

Audit your X account

To know where you want to go, you have to understand where you currently are. Auditing your X account is not only important to do, it’s something you should do regularly.

As you’re examining your account, ask these questions:

• What types of content are we posting?
• What’s successful?
• What isn’t working?
• Is our posting consistent?
• Who is our audience?
• When are our followers active?
• Are we seeing a return of investment (ROI)?
• What can we do to improve our X presence?

Many of these answers can be found in your X Analytics (still commonly called Twitter Analytics). Check out our snapshot to help you navigate X Analytics.

Pay particular attention to your audience and who they are. This is critical to determining the content that will work best for your brand on X.

Research your competition

As you’re getting a sense of what’s happening on your X account, it’s worthwhile to evaluate what your competition is doing as well.

This will help inform your own X strategy.

As you’re researching, ask these questions:

• What are they doing that you should be doing? Or can do better?
• What isn’t working for them?
• How do they handle customer service?
• How often are they posting?
• Are their followers engaging with them? How?

Dive deeper into what comprises a competitive analysis and how to start your own.

Set S.M.A.R.T. goals

Unsurprisingly, to know whether you’re successful in any marketing effort relies on the goals you set in the beginning.

Goals help us focus on what we want to achieve while also helping know when we need to pivot our strategy (because we’ll know if it’s working or not).

S.M.A.R.T. goals specifically are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

While you’re setting these goals, remember to break them down into measurable indicators so that you can easily grasp where you’re at in your efforts.

Maybe you want to drive more referral traffic from X to your website. Understand where you’re at now, identify where you want to be (within reason) and set a deadline to get there. Once you’ve added some actions that will help you get there, you’re well on your way to outlining an X strategy for your business.

Dive deeper (and beyond X) with our seven tips for setting achievable marketing goals for your business.

Create a set of guidelines

A lot can go wrong on social media. Creating a social media style guide will help keep your communications clear, consistent and representative of your brand at all times.

These guidelines, which span beyond just X, also help you onboard new team members more easily.

Be sure to include:

• Elements of your overall brand, such as tone
• Details about your audience
• Branded hashtags, including how and when to use them
• How and when to use emojis (and which emojis)
• How to format links

The key is to be ready for anything. And should the true unpredictable happen, include a standard operating procedure in order to decide the best course of action.

Make a content calendar

As you’re getting a sense of what works for your audience, you’ll want to plan out specific posts.

This will help you not only be more strategic and consistent overall with your posts, but you’ll also stay ahead of holidays and fun “social media holidays,” such as #NationalPuppyDay (for example).

As you’re creating your content calendar, think about:

• The best times to post
• How often you should post
• Any approval needed for your posts
• Balancing promotional posts with non-promotional posts

Check out our eight tips for creating a content calendar for your brand.

Follow best practices

As easy as this sounds, best practices can shift as platforms and audiences evolve. For X, it’s important to stay on top of any shifting practices and trends, since the platform has changed considerably since its rebrand.

However, in general, strive to:

• Maintain a customized profile that stands out
• Add value with your content (solving your audience’s pain points and challenges)
• Mix up your content types, with images, short-form video, polls and threads
• Add relevant hashtags where appropriate
• Engage with your audience by tagging them, responding to comments and so on
• Monitor your brand with social listening tactics
• Use a social media management tool to schedule your posts. X Pro (formerly TweetDeck) is now limited to X Premium+ subscribers, so many businesses use a third-party tool like Hootsuite instead

Consider paid advertisements

When it comes to paid advertisements on X, you have two general approaches:

• Promoted posts, where you pay for a post (which acts like any other post) to appear to a user who is not already following your account
• X Ads, where you have a goal beyond the promotion of a single post.

Types of X Ads include (but are not limited to):

• Follower growth ads
• Website clicks or conversions
• App-related promotion
• Lead generation
• Vertical video ads (now one of the fastest-growing ad surfaces on X)

See X's current advertising overview for the latest campaign objectives and formats.

Measure your results

This goes back to your S.M.A.R.T. goals. As your strategic efforts get underway on X, you want to regularly check in on your post performance.

How are you performing against your goals? In general, try to resist the draw of “vanity metrics,” such as pure follower number and likes. Keep a closer eye on click-throughs, comments and reposts.

Continue evaluating your goals, your performance and your ROI. Nothing should be “set it and forget it.” Social media is a fast changing industry, and you’ll want to stay ahead of the curve.

Now that you can make your X presence more effective, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. Schedule your free demo of DailyStory today.