One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they send out tweets to the “Twitter universe” is not treating each message as though they were an individual tweet. Each tweet should be tweaked to speak to an ideal customer, aka customer avatar, that they want to reach, as opposed to a mass message sent out to anyone and everyone.

This is the same kind of mistake that traditional marketers make. It’s also why advertising on television or in magazines is nowhere near as effective as it is online. When people feel like you are lumping them in with anyone and everyone else in the world, and not talking to them, about them, and with them, they are going to tune your message out and it begin to actively ignore you at every and any opportunity.

[Tweet “Each tweet should be tweaked to speak to an ideal customer, aka your customer avatar.”]

Are you talking AT your followers or TO them?

Fortunately, making a shift from talking at your followers and instead beginning to talk to and with them is a lot easier than most folks make it out to be. You really just have to figure out who you’re talking to, be a little more conscious about the messages in the verbiage you are spreading with your tweets – and from there everything just kind of falls into place!

Why You Need to Identify Your Customer First

I can recommend you envision your perfect prospect, and send each tweet out to them and them only. However, to craft content that speaks directly to someone, you have to figure out who that “someone” is – aka your ideal customer.

To figure out who this customer is, you need to create a customer avatar. Now hold on, even though you have probably heard this before, there is something to be said with learning how to create a customer avatar.

You see, marketers often highlight creating a customer avatar as an essential part of a marketing strategy. It might sound hard or a waste of time, but it’s not. It comes in handy when you’re trying to write copy for your audience.

[Tweet “Having a customer avatar to reference will help you to write compelling copy for your audience.”]

How to Create a Customer Avatar

If you don’t know exactly who you’re talking to, your messaging is going to fall short. You may have an idea of who your ideal client is. But you have to nail it, and it doesn’t have to be hard.

Think about your ideal customer. Here are few questions to ask yourself about this ideal customer, before you try to create any content directed towards them. Give your ideal customer a name and a personality!

• How old is he/she?
• What is her marital status?
• What is his highest level of education?
• What is her income level, and where does her money come from: a job, side hustle, self-employment?
• What does she like to do to have fun?
• What is his biggest problem in selling to his customers?
• Where does he/she live: urban city environment, countryside, mountain area?
• What blogs and magazines does she read for industry news?
• What events does he attend?

How to Apply This Client Avatar

The easy way to communicate effectively with your Twitter followers is to send a tweet out to your perfect prospect, your client avatar. Treat each individual Twitter message that you post as though it was going to a single recipient and only a single recipient.

[Tweet “Treat each individual Twitter message that you post as though it is going to a single recipient.”]

This will give each one of your messages a very direct kind of voice. It will also help you to kind of hone in on the words that you actually use to spread the messages that you are looking to share. Instead of treating everyone like a group, you are bringing them into the fold. As a result, you shouldn’t be surprised if you start to get Twitter messages back to you from people who feel as though you were talking directly to them.

How Using A Customer Avatar Helps You To Write Copy

This whole client avatar exercise may sound insignificant, but taking the time to figure out who your ideal customer really is will be a tremendous help as you start to craft the right content for your ideal audience, the content that gets attention and converts.

For instance, let’s say my ideal customer is someone who blogs. But I haven’t taken the time to define my customer avatar. My messaging can be fall on deaf ears because I’m using the wrong language.

Suppose I am writing social media posts to promote my blogging workbook bundle. I will speak to a full-time solopreneur who blogs for business different than I would talk to a full-time employed career professional who blogs as a hobby. Why? Because they likely have two different objectives for blogging.

Example 1: I might pitch the solopreneur with a tweet along the lines of “Grab this blogging workbook, use the editorial calendar, and you will never waste hours staring at a blank screen, wondering what you’re going to blog about again!”

Example 2: In contrast, I might pitch a full-time employed person with something like “Blogging might be a fun hobby, but even a hobby requires a bit of planning. Plan your content in advance like the full-time bloggers do, save a few hours each month and love your blog even more!”

Does this make sense? If I know who I’m talking to, I understand why they need my product or service, what they’ll use it for, and how it will benefit them.

For more information on building a client avatar and understanding your audience, see How to Use Social Media to Generate Leads.

Engage With Your Followers

The absolute worst thing you can do on Twitter is to tweet all of your own information, and not to communicate back and forth with your followers that are trying to strike up a relationship with you. In other words, talk AT your followers, and not WITH them.

[Tweet “When tweeting, share your own information AND communicate back and forth with your followers.”]

Caveat: You’ll want to completely ignore this tip when it comes to trolls. Ignore them, always ignore them.

But if you have legitimate followers that want to communicate with you, it’s in your best interest to use instant and public communication tools like Twitter to get the conversation rolling and to engage as often as you can.

Related Article: 7 Ways to Build Your Twitter Following

When you are first starting out on Twitter this can be a difficult line to balance as you don’t want to spend all your time on Twitter. Once your operation is really rocking and rolling you can dedicate more assets and more resources to your Twitter department and from there the conversations can really flow.

Rinse, Repeat and Apply on All Social Media Channels

These tips are useful for all the major social media platforms – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. On these specific platforms, you want to target your content to a specific person. This helps you from simply posting random content, uncoordinated at best.

Remember,

• Craft content that speaks to the needs of one person – your ideal customer.
• Post content using the right language.
• Don’t simply push your own content. Curate a mix of original content and resources from other sources that your ideal customer will find helpful.
• When people comment, like and share, respond as though they were in person. Say please, thank you, and answer questions. Mind your social media manners!

Most important of all: Engage with customers, don’t simply talk AT them, but TO them.

Have a conversation with your followers, and they will engage and talk back. It may take some time to get a response, and this is to be expected. If you nail your messaging, they will talk back, in the form of likes, comments, shares, website traffic and conversions.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya