How to make your startup’s Twitter account stand out
If you work at a startup you’re probably looking to build a big following on social media for your brand. With plenty of social media networks available and likely limited resources on your side, you’ll ultimately need to pick the ones that work best for your brand.
Most tech startups add Twitter to their mix. It is amongst the top three networking apps in the USA with overall close to 400 million users. It’s far from being the largest (with Facebook’s 2,9 billion users and Youtube’s over 2 billion users), but it’s tremendously popular amongst professionals, especially in the tech industry.
At Rows, we see Twitter as one of the key social media platforms for our product. A place where we can connect with the existing users and get the new ones, engage in conversations, announce new product releases and get feedback right away.
Nail your Twitter Strategy
When early in 2022 we shared with our Twitter followers the mockups on the billboards we designed to place near Google and Microsoft HQs, the tweet went viral getting over 100,000 impressions.
Other examples of Rows having a moment on Twitter include tech and productivity gurus Sahil Bloom @Sahil Bloom and Packy McCormick @packyM speaking about our product.
Alas those hyper successful tweets aren’t easy to repeat every time.
It’s hard to predict tweets’ performance, and you should step in this game without expectations of getting it right every time. As any channel, it takes time and understanding your audience to master it.
But a clear vision, consistency and ability to listen to your followers would help you stay on the winning side.
When mapping out our strategy on Twitter at Rows, we looked up to people who reached definite success on Twitter and amassed a large and loyal following. We mainly were paying attention to creators, not brands accounts, as we wanted to build a tribe of people genuinely interested in spreadsheets, productivity and our product.
Here are a couple of people whose advices we leaned on when mapping out Twitter strategy:
Alex Lieberman, Executive Chairman of Morning Brew frequently shares tips on growing your audience. His recently published 13-step Twitter growth playbook - an honest take on tactics that worked best for him.
We also follow Julian Shapiro’s advices. He is a writer, private investor and Demand Curve founder, who greatly sum-ups actionable tips for startups in his tweets like this one.
Here is our short Twitter playbook for a startup:
· Find your niche. Trying to attach your brand to the conversations where it doesn’t belong, won’t help.
· Speak with your audience in a conversational tone, don’t use marketing pitch.
· Always answer comments and questions, even uncomfortable ones. Honesty will pay off and make your users loyal and understanding of possible product’s setbacks.
· Trend-jacking works. If you have something valuable to add to the conversation, jump in!
· But don’t tweet unless you have something truly interesting to say, people will avoid clutter and might cut you off.
· Don’t be too formal. Share with the community funny stories, your learnings and flops. Our build-in-public posts get a lot of views and engagement.
Never miss a tweet
Not only writing, but also timely noticing and responding to tweets related to your brand is very important. You want to thank people for giving your product shoutouts and quickly get back to those with questions or issues with your product.
To respond quickly and engage with your followers you need to keep Twitter always open, constantly checking in. Even this can cause issues with delayed responses and missed mentions 🤯.
To solve this problem for ourselves, we created a spreadsheet that helps us to monitor Rows mentions on Twitter, and alerts our team once there is something new. It saves us a ton of time checking Twitter! Now you too can build such a spreadsheet to outsource monitoring Twitter for you to Rows.
The spreadsheet is connected with the built-in Twitter integration. It automatically checks Twitter every 10 minutes for anything Rows related (tweets or replies). Once our Twitter handle @RowsHQ is mentioned on Twitter, the spreadsheet pulls a new tweet and ads it to the overall table.
It also immediately sends alerts to our dedicated channel on Slack called #alerts_twitter_mentions. So our Growth team can see a new tweet and respond in a timely manner.
Actually, the rest of the team also enjoys receiving good reviews and mentions of our product. And our Product and Engineers teams are able to join the discussion if there are technical questions.
It’s a very low effort spreadsheet we created in Rows. Having set it up once, we never have to go again to this spreadsheet, and it works great.
We turned it into a Track Twitter mentions with Slack template, so you can set it up in minutes to track your brand or product on Twitter. Check it out.
Aside from tracking your brand mentions you can do a lot more with Rows.
Easily monitor your social media growth in one place with this Social Media Growth template. Thanks to built-in integrations you can easily connect your spreadsheet to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to monitor your followers growth.
You’ll see in the spreadsheet total followers, new followers, growth %. The best part - all data will be added and regularly updated automatically, so you can stop visiting multiple platforms to collect your data manually. Reporting made easy with Rows.
Give these templates a try and let us know if you get your own ideas on how to track social media with Rows. We’re always happy to share new cool spreadsheets in our Community.
