Beyond the ability to market on a daily basis to your followers, a key advantage for capturing a relevant audience on Twitter is the ability to privately communicate with your top fans through Twitter’s direct message medium. If you have not captured a target as a follower, you’ll have to engage with them publicly and there’s plenty of reasons why this should not be considered the ideal means of communication.
As I detail below, here are the top five reasons for private proactive engagement:
- Message Targets - With private messaging, you can target your fans based on your particular campaign objectives. A number of services allow you to target based on geography and interests as well as allowing for personalizing the engagements. With public messages, target your top prospects and/or influencers. With the limited number of tweets that are reasonable to push out per day, it’s crucial for your brand to get the most out of your directed outreach.
- Message Varieties - With private messaging, all you have to do is perfect the one message that resonates best with your target audience. With public messaging, it’s important to add a variety of messages as many of your targets will click-through to your feed and you don’t want them noticing the same message repeated.
- Message Types - With private messaging, an initial communication can be a question or even a call to action that includes a link because you have already developed trust with your fans. With public messaging, be very careful when sharing links as users are often skeptical of random mentions that contain shortened links.
- Message Timing - With private messaging, all the messages can go out at the same time. With public messaging, you’ll likely want to stagger your directed messages and fill your stream with ‘filler content’ that can break up the similar messages.
- Message Frequency - With private messaging, you should ideally put your targets on a drip strategy to optimize your desired action. With public messaging, be ready to stop communication if the targets are not responsive.
Strive to build a meaningful audience as quickly as possible, and turn your social followers into the second coming of your email list. Good luck activating your audience!
