Updated August 2024
X is the perfect place for your business to connect with customers and potential customers. Most brands use X to keep in touch with their fans in real time, but the third most popular social network (310 million unique visitors each month isn’t too shabby!) has a lot more to offer than this simple benefit.
Savvy businesses use X to:
- participate in and stay up-to-date on industry-based conversations
- build brand awareness and identity
- check out the competition
- locate and engage with your target audience
- promote sales, giveaways and contests, and offer coupon codes
- market your blog content, products or service for free (you can also use paid advertising — X Ads)
People spend an average of 170 minutes per month on X, which is roughly 5-6 minutes a day, so to successfully grab a user’s attention, you’ll need to post multiple times a day. Doing that manually is near impossible because it’s very time-consuming to write, post, monitor, read, repost and reply to everything that’s going on, but with the right social media tools you can hit that target and reach your marketing goals.
Here are 6 content marketing tools that will help you increase your engagement on X:
1. DrumUp
What better way to relate to your audience than with quality articles. DrumUp is a social media content marketing and employee advocacy platform that lets you curate content from a large variety of sources, schedule social media posts on multiple accounts, and create/schedule custom posts. You can even add your favorite RSS feeds and save posts to your content library to make sharing easier.
This app provides you with fresh content on a daily basis and comes with a one-click scheduling feature that saves you a ton of time. Additionally, it recommends smart hashtags for your content to help you get seen more.
Sharing helpful posts, videos or infographics with your audience — from your iPhone, Android or Chrome extension — is more likely to start a discussion and you can turn your employees into brand advocates with DrumUp’s employee advocacy program.
2. X Pro
X Pro (formerly TweetDeck) is an all-in-one X management tool that is particularly useful for audience engagement. You can keep track of multiple accounts, topics, hashtags and mentions — all in one convenient place. You can see when users are talking about your brand and respond to them instantly without leaving the dashboard.
Plus you can create X lists, monitor analytics and trends, and export custom timelines to your website. This is one of the best tools for real-time X management.
3. Nurph
If you host X chats on a regular basis to talk to your audience, Nurph is a great tool to use. You can instantly start a real-time video-to-video X conversation by sending invitations with hashtags to your followers through text, audio and video.
Unlike Periscope, X’s live streaming video mobile app, which is not exactly social (yes, brands who broadcast live can interact with their audience but that’s not the same as a conversation), Nurph allows “free-flowing group chats.” And if that’s not enough, Nurph also offers sound effects and emojis.
With this platform, you can integrate hashtags, replay chats in real time and get insights into your community. Once the chat is done, you can use the post-chat analytics feature to find out details like most influential participants, most active participants, most re-posted X posts and much more. In case your subscribers tend to forget, you can also send SMS reminders.
4. Bit.ly
Bit.ly, a link management platform, is mostly known as a URL shortening service (especially helpful on X where every character counts), but it has so much more to offer.
You can shorten or create custom URLs and share them across multiple platforms and then track the link you shared via a bitmark to find out which ones work best for your audience — the stats page will show you how many people clicked on it, shared it, and which websites are driving traffic. This is helpful for boosting engagement on X as you can target a specific set of people with certain links.
The tool also provides analytics so you can monitor and improve what and when you share — just add a plus sign (+) to the end of a bitmark and you’ll be able to see statistics for that URL. It also adapts to different platforms, detects when a user is on mobile or not and guides them accordingly, and can be integrated with 75 publishing platforms.
5. Piktochart
Visual content is a must on social media because it is more likely to capture and hold the audience’s attention. Piktochart is a simple tool that helps you create visual content in a matter of minutes and share it on multiple social media accounts.
All you have to do is follow a simple process – choose a template that matches your style or message (they have over 500), add images, data, icons, text or videos, customize font and color, and voila! When you’ve perfected your infographic or pie chart, you can share it on multiple platforms, create presentations or simply download it for later.
6. Audiense
Note: Audiense was formerly called SocialBro.
Audiense is all about audience insight. It’s a combination of various tools that can enhance your community management by giving you a much more precise understanding of your community, including what kind of content they like, gender ratios, languages spoken, influential people who follow you, and so much more. With all this information, you can make informed decisions about your audience instead of guessing.
You can also target them better by using Ad and Direct Message campaigns. It is a paid tool but if you’re serious about marketing, this platform can be an amazing resource.
X Tips
These 6 tools are valuable resources for businesses looking to form relationships with their customers as well as a wider audience — provided that you know how to use them right. Keep in mind that you don’t have to use all of them; experiment a little to discover which ones suit you best.
In addition to these 6 tools, here are 7 useful tips to help you rock your presence on X:
- Post several times a day. Once a day isn’t enough because your content will get buried (see infographic below for best times of day to post).
- If you want a re-post, ask for it. SalesForce identified that X posts that specifically request users for a re-post are 12 times more likely to receive it.
- Posts during working hours drive 30% higher engagement than posts during inactive hours.
- Use stunning images. Eye-catching visuals increase individuals willingness to read content by about 80%.
- Use shortened links for better readability. Presentation matters and will add to the feel of your brand on social media.
- Keep it shorter than short. X posts with less than 100 characters invite 17% more activity when compared to longer X posts.
- Make your post visually appealing because posts with images get a whopping 313% more engagement.
