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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

For marketers

Timeline

Twitter home timeline is a news feed displaying a real time stream of tweets from accounts you’re following on Twitter in chronological order. The Twitter home timeline is a great tool to understand your followers’ interest, keep up with competitors, and get the latest insights in market research.

DMs

DMs are private messages supporting text, photos, links, emojis, and tweets sent between users in one-to-one private conversations or between groups. By default, again, DMs can only be sent to users who are following you on Twitter, but business accounts can opt to receive DMs from anyone. And this is a great way to take customer service one step further.

From a paid marketing perspective, you can also target your top followers with the specific DM campaign and contact users for copyright on tweets they created as you might want to showcase in a moment or campaign.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a very useful tool and interface to view multiple timelines and hashtag searches in one place. It’s also great for scheduling tweets in advance, managing multiple Twitter accounts, and building tweets collections to feed in moments, or create user and press reviews.

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is a function that allows users to find tweets related to specific handles, keywords, and hashtags. Twitter search is a great tool to discover trends, customer queries, and competitive insights. You can also leverage Twitter search to understand the sentiments around your brand, campaign, event, and so on, based on specific hashtags and username.

Notifications

Twitter notifications are a function that alerts users when their handle has been mentioned, retweeted or direct messaged. You can use notifications to alert customers directly to get instant alerts around events, users, and conversations second by second.

Geo-tagging

Geo-tagging is the act of stamping the location details of where a tweet was created, which enables users to search for tweets within a given area. This can be enabled or disabled. Geo tags are a great way to give more information on the location of a tweet, offer, or event without impacting your character count. It also enables users to find your tweets when looking for content around them, thereby making your brand more relevant to a local community.

Moments

Moments are curated stories showcasing the very best of what’s happening on Twitter, customized and edited to show the current topics that are popular or relevant to the user.

Moments are a great storytelling tool that you can use to highlight customers by showcasing your tweets in relation to your brand, which can potentially increase brand affinity, awareness, and engagement.

Connect

Connect provides a fast and easy way to connect you to your accounts you may be interested in or reconnect you with old friends on Twitter through your device’s address book.

The Connect tab can be used to find new competitors and connect with influencers and partner brands.

Mute words

Mute words is a feature that allows users to start receiving messages for a specific word phrase, username, emoji, or hashtag. Mute words is very useful for filtering down notifications to only the most important matches that you say and ignoring any general noise around your account such as mentions from trolls. More on that later.

Trends

Twitter trends is a particular subject or conversation topic that is popular around a goal, or a specific area and is used to classify tweets on a platform and increase their visibility. Trends are a great way to collect insights on user interest at any given time. Marketers can use pay promoted trends to gain visibility and awareness, and brands can incite virality by participating in conversations focused around trendy hashtags.

Lists

Lists are curated groups of Twitter users organized by specific topics, interests, or locations. Lists are a great way to connect with influencers, industry leaders, and employees, stay up-to-date with competition and keep an eye on industry trends.

Block

Block allows users to remove followers, disabling them from re-following, mentioning, direct messaging, or adding you to Twitter lists ever again. Blocking sanitizes your followership so you can focus on a more valuable audience and it keeps Twitter a brand-safe environment.

Quick replies

Quick replies are a feature that prompts users with the best ways of replying to a direct message, whether it’s choosing from a list of options or guiding users to enter specific text values.

Welcome messages

Welcome messages are messages that greet people and set expectations as they enter a direct message conversation.

Quick replies and welcome messages are both great tools for increasing brand sympathy by reducing customer wait time through automation until a service agent is actually needed.

Cards

Twitter cards are an enhanced version of a tweet that enables the attachment of media to tweet for the purpose of driving traffic to your website. There are four types of cards: the summary card, the summary card with a large image, the app card, and the player card.

By allowing users to preview your website and content Twitter cards can drive engagement and app installs. Twitter card analytics also show you how to optimize your cards’ performance.

Social plugins

Social plugins are tools that other websites can use to provide people with personalized social experience. So when a user interacts with a plugin, they could share experiences from Twitter with their friends and connections.

These are the plugins available for Twitter: tweet and follow, message button, embedded tweets, moments, and timeline. It’s important to choose the appropriate plugin for your brand’s marketing goals. Plugins are a great tool for creating a relevant bridge between your website and Twitter and increasing engagement with your tweets outside of the platform.

Timestamps

Timestamps let anyone tweet a live or replay video starting from the exact moment that they want to discuss. So, when you tap to share a live video you can easily slide back to the exact time that you want your audience to watch. Timestamps are a great way to increase engagement on videos as it directs your viewers to the specific most relevant content.

APIs

Twitter APIs are a feature that allows third-party developers to build software and tools based on Twitter data and feature sets. APIs can help you centralize social media management tasks and gain time, get a quick view at your profile performance without switching accounts, and leverage extra features from the API that might not exist on Twitter.

Profile settings

Each social platform generally has three separate classifications for their account and post types and Twitter is no exception.

  • Public: Public tweets are the default setting and are visible to anyone whether or not they have a Twitter account.
  • Private: Private means that your profile can choose to protect its tweets and protected tweets are only available to those that you allow to follow you.
  • Verify: Verify profiles are accounts on Twitter that let people know that an account of public interest that’s authentic and it’s marked by blue checkmark.

It’s important for marketers to understand which profile type might be suitable for their business’s goals and needs.

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Sadé Council

Digital Marketing Strategist @ L’Oréal USA

  • 11+ years’ experience with brands across fashion, sports, entertainment, financial services, lifestyle & beauty verticals
  • Currently advising on digital marketing initiatives for Carol's Daughter 
  • Expertise in content creation, community management, integrated marketing & influencer relations
  • American football fanatic, former full-time ballerina and currently moonlighting as DJ Dae

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

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You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Twitter
Sadé Council
Skills Expert

This module begins by describing the value to digital marketers of using Twitter and by outlining the key Twitter terminology that marketers need to be familiar with. It goes on to show how to set up and customize a Twitter account, and how to take advantage of the platform’s key features. It teaches you how to use Twitter Ads Manager to run campaigns and outlines the different ad formats available on Twitter. Finally, it provides you with the knowledge to leverage Twitter Analytics to analyze and optimize your Twitter campaigns.