Why All Your Tweets Should be Directed to Just One Person

How engaged is that audience of 10,000 that you’ve built up on Twitter? Take a look at your analytics, or just think back to the past three or four tweets you sent. How many people replied? Retweeted? Clicked?

There are plenty of reasons why your content isn’t getting the engagement you’d like on Twitter – but one that is often overlooked by marketers is its lack of focus.

It’s important that those 10,000 (or 100, or 1,000,000) followers you have are targeted. They should represent your target market, and the consumers you want to reach. But on Twitter you’ve got to go one step further than that, and direct all of your content to a single person within that audience.

It might sound ludicrous to write several tweets per day, all directed to one person, but it’s a strategic decision that will make each tweet more impactful.

The idea is to pick the best representative of your target market, and tweet to them. This individual should mirror the demographics, psychographics, lifestyle, shopping and browsing behavior and other features of your target audience.

Then, once this person is selected, hold them in your mind every time you compose a tweet.

Since they represent the exact center of your target audience, by creating content just for them, you will actually create stronger, more targeted content that will resonate with your entire audience.

Now, when you write tweets “for” a single person, you shouldn’t address them to that person by including their username. That would indeed send them the tweet, but that’s not the point of this exercise. Instead, imagine that you are writing the tweet in the hopes that they will see it in their timeline.

Here are some questions that you can ask yourself to help create more engaging content using this strategy:

• What type of content are they most likely to engage with?
• What tone of voice should you use? Will they respond better to a professional tone? Casual?
• Are they browsing Twitter from their tablet? Mobile phone? Desktop? How can you optimize your content for their platform?
• What other websites and brands do they engage with?
• What time of day are they most likely to be tweeting?

Asking these questions about a large, amorphous “audience” can sometimes be difficult. The time of day, for instance, might be early mornings for one segment, or mid-after noon for another. But if you can focus in on a single person, these questions become much easier to answer.

Once you’ve positioned your content so that it is directed towards that one member of your audience, you need to measure the impact and compare it against your previous efforts. After all, you need to ensure that you’re targeting the right individual.

If you continue to revise and retarget your content based on the reactions from your audience, you may find that you’re no longer speaking to an actual Twitter user in your tweets, but more of a persona that represents your audience – and this is a good thing. Most great marketing teams have a persona that they use to guide their campaigns and messaging, and this method is just one way to begin to build yours.