Blog

Twitter is growing in importance as a way for insurance agents to promote their businesses to customers. It can be a great tool, for a lot of reasons—for little or no cost, you can reach a very large audience quickly and easily.

However, Twitter and other social media platforms do have a cost—in time, if not in money. And it’s not unusual for insurance agents and others to struggle with getting a return on their social media investment that makes the time they spend worthwhile.

If you’re not getting customers, followers, and business through Twitter, these easy tweaks might help.

Write short tweets. Yes, 140 characters is already really short. But if you write tweets that go right up to the character limit, your followers will have to edit it down for length if they want to retweet it. Save them the trouble by imposing your own limit of 120 characters or less.

Shorten your URLs. You can use tools such as bitly or owly to shorten URLs you post as links in Twitter. This will keep long links from eating up your character limits. You can also use these tools to monitor who’s clicking on the links you’re using.

Don’t get too creative with your Twitter handle. It should be short and easy to remember, and clearly associated with your business. If your first and last name are already taken, or if they’re too long for the character limit, go for a simple name that speaks to what you offer customers.

Avoid being obviously self-promotional. The rule of thumb on Twitter is 80-20—spend 80% of the time giving to your audience in the way of providing helpful information or entertainment, or promoting other followers. Then, you can promote your own business 20% of the time.

Avoid obvious annoyances. Stay away from overusing hashtags, overwrought punctuation, or all caps. Don’t use insurance jargon or abbreviations unless you’re talking to an audience you’re sure understands it.

Respond quickly to notifications. If someone calls you out on Twitter, respond right away. Have a protocol in place to deal with negative feedback, so you won’t have to think of what to do in the heat of the moment.

Keep it positive. As much as you might want to, don’t say negative things disparaging your competition or anyone else. You never know who might be listening.

Promote other people. Retweet and favorite other people’s work as much as you can. The more you support others, the more they’ll do the same for you.

Social media can be a great way to reach your audience—but even a little mistake can really hurt your performance. Follow this advice, and you should be able to generate a bigger following on Twitter—and elsewhere online.