Using Social Media Algorithms to Your Advantage - Twitter (2 of 4)

Part 2 of 4 - How to Use Twitter's's Algorithm to Your Advantage [Series]

As we’ve said many times before, any business-to-business marketing strategy has a place for social media activities. However, due to the algorithms these websites have in place to prioritize their content, you have to understand what each is looking for in order to make the best use of each. This second installment of our four-part series will focus on how to leverage Twitter’s algorithms to your advantage.

Tapping Twitter

Twitter has quickly shown its worth as one of the more versatile social media outlets for businesses, as it permits business users to quickly and directly engage with their audience, sharing content, links, and other digestible snippets of valuable information. By nature, the channel promotes conversation between you and your audience, which in turn allows you to generate more favorable impressions among them.

However, in order for your content to be seen by your audience, you need to understand how Twitter arranges and prioritizes tweets. Unsurprisingly, the algorithm Twitter employs leans heavily on the user’s activity history.

For instance, a user’s organic engagement with you on Twitter will strongly influence how much of your content is shared. The more they seek you out, the more that they will be shown, and vice versa. If they interact with one of your tweets, their followers are also able to see it through their connection to them, further expanding your reach. Using strategic hashtags throughout your tweets will also serve this purpose. Twitter will also boost your tweets if they achieve a high level of organic engagement.

Timing is Everything

Timing is another crucial consideration, especially considering that Twitter largely follows a live-stream format in reverse chronological order. While Twitter will boost some of your content, it is still important that you time your posts to your audience’s peak activity levels--after all, you want your content to be seen by as many of your followers as possible.

However, exactly when this is can be hard to determine, as different sources cite that different times show peak Twitter use from B2B-connected accounts. Hubspot and Hootsuite both claim that 3 o’clock on a weekday afternoon is one of the best times to tweet to a B2B audience. Hubspot also adds noontime to their schedule. Meanwhile, Kissmetrics says that 5 o’clock on a weekday is the optimal time to tweet.

When it really comes down to it, there really won’t be a single ideal time for all businesses to tweet out their content. Rather, each business will have their own ideal time to tweet each type of content they are sharing to their particular audience. In order to find yours, you will need to run a few tests and draw your conclusions from there.

Speaking of types of content, it also pays to include additional media in your tweets if your audience has shown to engage with it. Twitter’s algorithm works to show video content to users who more often engage with video, and links more often to those who engage with links.

Finally, there is some question as to whether Twitter prioritizes tweets based on their location compared to the location of the user. This has not been confirmed by Twitter. Regardless, it is still worthwhile for an SMB to maintain a healthy Twitter presence to help make the impressions to convert a contact to a client.

Putting Twitter to Use

Being mindful of these practices will allow you to get the most return from your social media strategy as far as Twitter is concerned. If you’d like some more help in managing your business social media for maximum benefit, let’s talk. We can help you put systems and processes in place to optimize your social media usage and more!

Check back in for our next installment of this series, where we’ll examine how Facebook operates as a marketing tool.