The Ultimate Guide to X Marketing for Your Small Business
X is one of the most popular social media platforms, with over 300 million active monthly users. For small businesses looking to expand their reach online, X offers a unique opportunity to build brand awareness, connect with customers, drive website traffic, and even make sales.
2024 X marketing will become even more vital for small business success. With more intelligent algorithms, new features like X Communities, and an increasing number of users, small businesses that harness the power of X will gain a competitive advantage in their industries.
This guide covers everything small businesses need to know to crush their X marketing in 2024.
Key Takeaways
Sharpen X's performance in 2024 by…
✅ Conducting competitor research
✅ Creating strategic alignment behind goals
✅ Monitoring niche conversations
✅ Testing various content formats
✅ Building loyal subscriber communities
✅ Tracking analytics rigorously
✅ Optimizing paid campaigns
✅ Publishing exclusive value-add offers
✅ Making consumer feedback central
Table of Contents
Ultimate Guide to X Marketing for Small Business
Setting Up Your X Marketing Foundation
Before diving headfirst into advanced X marketing, take time to establish a rock-solid foundation for long-term success. Often, small businesses rush into tweeting randomly without the fundamentals—don’t make this mistake!
Follow this X setup checklist to kickstart your efforts correctly from day one:
Claim Business Profile
Register your X handle using an email tied to your business domain name for branding continuity. Use your company name in the handle (e.g. @BrandName). Complete your profile fully with a strong bio, location, website URL, photo and header image.
Craft Compelling Bio
Your X bio makes a vital first impression on visitors, compelling them to follow you and stick around. Summarise what you do, essential products/services and differentiators like awards or certifications.
Strategic Profile Photo
Profiles with a professional headshot receive up to 3X more engagements on average. Yet, only use a corporate logo if branding is paramount for your strategy. Show personality!
Visual Header Image
Your header image appears atop your profile and in searches. Design an eye-catching graphic incorporating branding elements, products or messaging around your niche.
Follow Industry Leaders
Identify critical voices in your broader industry, like national associations, top influencers and leading content sites. Follow relevant analysts, journalists and competitors, too. Comment on their content and retweet to establish your presence. Building connections across your space paves the way for future partnerships.
Setup Conversations List
Curate a custom list of 20-50 rising influencers, partners, media personalities and industry experts you want to connect with. Check their updates daily and interact regularly to build familiarity, leading to relationships organically.
Install Analytics Tracking
Before publishing lots of content, install X analytics software like Sprout Social or Union Metrics. Connect your X profile to start gathering data on day one for comparison later—Hunt for follower demographics, engagement rates, best content timing and more.
Refine Ideal Buyer Persona
Getting crystal clear on your target customer’s demographics, challenges, goals, and psychographics is mission-critical for creating perfectly tailored X content. Refine your buyer persona with data, including conversation analysis and feedback surveys.
Build Content Calendar
Sketch tweets and ideas on an editorial calendar spanning 4-8 weeks organised by categories based on your content pillars. This content calendar helps you ideate tons of tweets at once while sequencing posts strategically.
Schedule Publication Times
Use analytics or responses to compare tweet engagement at different times and days. Identify when your followers are most active. Schedule 80% of tweets during peak windows for visibility while allowing some real-time flexibility to jump into trending topics.
Set Up Management Tools
Social media management platforms like Agorapulse, Sprout Social and Sendible help maximise efficiency. Centralise publishing across networks, collaborate with your team, schedule tweets in advance and analyse performance.
Construct Conversion Funnels
Ultimately, you want to guide X followers into becoming loyal customers. Map out the perfect step-by-step path you want visitors to follow from initial click to purchase. Then, craft messaging drives people down the funnel.
With these essentials established from the start, your X presence launches with built-in user experience, analytics and conversion best practices—key to achieving success in social media marketing.
Competitor Analysis – Who Are You Up Against?
Before diving into X marketing, analyse competitors by X. Research how often competitors tweet, what content resonates most with their followers, their engagement levels, and more.
This competitor analysis will give you insight into what works well on X for your target audience. You can then model competitors' actions while differentiating your brand messaging and content.
Analyse the following when performing a competitor X analysis:
Tweet Frequency & Timing
The number of tweets competitors send weekly when they tweet most, and how this impacts engagement. Identify the peak times when your audience is most active.
Content-Type
What types of tweets—images, videos, quotes, links get the highest engagement? What content formats should you focus on?
Messaging & Brand Voice
What messaging stands out most? What is their brand voice like? Get inspiration for crafting your brand voice.
Engagement Metrics
Track competitors’ followers count, likes, retweets, replies & clicks over time. See which tweets drive the most engagement.
Paid Ads Activity
Are competitors utilising X ads? How frequently? See if paid could amplify your organic efforts.
Analyse Other Related Accounts
In addition to competitor research,
analyse other accounts on X in your broader industry or niche. Identify influencers, brands, and thought leaders providing value for your target customers. See what key topics and trends perform best to inform your approach.
Build an initial list of 10-20 accounts across your competitive set and industry. Use a social media analytics tool like Mention or Sprout Social to review relevant data and statistics over time. This information will prove invaluable as you craft engaging, high-performing Tweets tailored to your audience.
Creating a Strong X Marketing Strategy
With competitor analysis complete, developing your X marketing game plan is time. Defining your X strategy upfront leads to clarity on objectives, more impactful content, and better analytics to gauge effectiveness.
Include the following core elements when building out your small business X marketing blueprint for 2024:
Craft Your Brand Voice
The best brand voices on X balance professionalism with approachability and humour when appropriate. Spend time crafting messaging for your target audience and niche while showcasing your brand’s personality.
Utilise Visual Content
Tweets with images see a 35% higher clickthrough rate on average. Use visual assets like infographics, product photos, behind-the-scenes pictures, memes and more that will capture attention as followers scroll.
Curate Content from Industry Experts
Don’t just push your content. Share insightful statistics, compelling quotes, helpful resources and more from established players in your industry. Position your brand as a curator in your niche.
Listen and Interact with Followers
Use X’s advanced search to monitor tweets about your products, brand and niche. Like, reply and retweet followers often. Ask questions to spark dialogue. Social listening strengthens customer relationships.
Give Sneak Peeks of New Products
Build anticipation by giving X followers exclusive first looks at upcoming product launches, redesigns or new content series live-tweeting events. Early access makes followers feel like VIPs.
Live Stream Product Demos, Events
X’s live streaming functionality makes real-time video a massive opportunity for small businesses in 2024. Stream behind-the-scenes footage at your office, product how-tos, expert Q&As, unboxing videos or on-location at special events. Live video builds authenticity and stronger connections.
Cultivate Brand Ambassadors
Loyal customers who organically rave about your brand on X are gold. Retweet and highlight these brand ambassadors. You can formally enrol select super fans in an ambassador program with perks and rewards. Ambassadors expand awareness exponentially.
Strategic Partnerships
Identify strategic partnership opportunities with brands in complementary spaces that serve your target buyer persona.
X Newsletter
Publish a customised X newsletter distributed directly into the feeds of opted-in followers. X newsletters are an impactful “owned broadcast channel” perfect for small businesses. Send newsletters with updates subscribers care about most.
Automate Lead-Gen with DMs
Program X automatically sends new followers a personalised DM inviting them to visit your website, sign up for a newsletter, or contact sales. Automated DMs scale up lead generation massively.
X Marketing Analytics
Of course, your stellar Tweets and community-building efforts are pointless if you don’t continuously analyse performance and refine your approach over time.
Make sure to measure key X analytics across three buckets consistently:
Business Outcomes
What tangible business value is X driving? Track website traffic leads and sales generated from X alongside Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for paid campaigns.
Audience Insights
Who is our content reaching and resonating with? Which tweets engage our existing followers most? Who are our new followers? Persona intelligence informs better content.
Content Metrics
Assess impression volume, engagement rate, clicks, retweets and likes per tweet. See overall tweet and follower growth pace week-over-week. Identify your highest and lowest-performing tweet formats. A/B test tweaks.
Platforms like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Union Metrics help track X analytics across these core areas so you can continually refine and improve your small business social media strategy.
X Content Formats
While getting your X foundation set is vital, followers ultimately engage most with compelling content tailored to their preferences.
Diving deeper into what tweet formats and styles resonate allows you to spark interest consistently. Don't just copy competitors; develop content with your brand personality ingrained that provides genuine value.
Below are creative examples of engaging tweet styles to incorporate based on your goals and audience segment:
Entertaining Infographics
Well-designed infographics simplify complex data into easily digestible, visually engaging snackable graphics made for X. Insert stats from industry reports, how-to steps and more into colourful infographics.
Behind-the-Scenes Photos
Give followers an authentic inside look at what goes on within your company by sharing candid photos of actual employees at work, company events, office culture and recent achievements. The peek behind the curtain builds rapport.
Wow-Factor Statistics
Incorporate the latest peripheral industry statistics, growth metrics, adoption rate predictions, and similar numerical data points worth stopping for into tweets. Statistics perceived as valuable get retweeted more on average.
Customer Testimonial Videos
User-generated content directly from existing buyer stories packs immense credibility for prospects still evaluating your brand. Film brief customer testimonial videos spotlighting specific use cases and successes, then tweet them.
Ask Me Anything
Host “Ask Me Anything” X chats where followers directly query your founders, CEO, topic experts or department heads about their experience, advice and industry outlooks—position leadership as forward-thinking thought leaders.
X Poll Questions
Build engagement through quick X polls asking customers for feedback like rating a recent webinar’s helpfulness, voting on new emojis to represent your brand, selecting their preferred content formats or sharing why they first purchased from you.
User-Generated Content Contests & Giveaways
Run contests for followers, asking them to tweet videos reviewing your product or photos showing creative ways they incorporate you into everyday life. The wave of UGC expands visibility exponentially while offering actual customer use cases. You can even do giveaways of small prizes or free samples to incentivise participation further.
A Day in the Life Photo Series
Capture a full day in the life of different customer segments—busy parents, young professionals, healthcare workers, etc—using your product threaded into tweets every 30 minutes. The inside look resonates with similar buyers, imagining themselves reflected.
Nostalgic Throwbacks
Scroll back through company history to find memorable product milestones, internal events, and customer testimonials to tweet as fun throwbacks followers will enjoy. Include hashtags like #throwbackthursday. Nostalgia makes strong connections.
Advanced Community Engagement Tactics
X marketing rockstars don’t just broadcast one-way at audiences; they facilitate two-way dialogue—building loyalty and even friendships with followers over time through consistent interaction.
Deploy these proven X community activation techniques:
Reshare User-Generated Content
When customers post great product photos, unboxing videos, positive reviews, or testimonials, make sure to reshare them from your branded account, adding your comment. Put the spotlight on your biggest fans.
Run X Challenges
Coordinate hashtag challenges encouraging users to post videos or images of themselves participating, like “Show us your office setup with our gear”. Challenges increase awareness, user content and engagement.
Leverage X Moments
Curate tweets from recent events, launches or campaigns into a customised “X Moment” showcasing interactions and experiences fans can scroll through at leisure.
Promote Positive Reviews
Ask delighted customers to leave favourable ratings/reviews in significant marketplaces like G2 or Capterra. Re-share them on X, quoting the positive feedback driving authority when published.
Spotlight Brand Defenders
When you see a happy customer organically defending your company or correcting misinformation, praise them publicly by tweeting back with gratitude. Positive reinforcement incentivises them to keep advocating.
Host X Takeovers
Invite standout micro-influencers in aligned niches who engage heavily with your community to “takeover” publishing from your branded X handle for a full day. Give them creative freedom to share their perspectives on your brand, space, and products through an authentic lens that followers recognise.
Curate User Tweets as Community Highlights
Collect and publish outstanding tweets, reviews, product images, and Q&As customers create onto your website's branded Community Highlights page, updated monthly. The external social proof holds tremendous credibility for site visitors on the fence.
Launch Loyalty Program
Consider constructing an official tiered loyalty program associated with your X community, offering graduated rewards like members-only webinars, product discounts and early access opportunities based on engagement milestones achieved.
Community Recognition Badging
Spotlight top community contributors and brand advocates by tagging them with special recognition badges under profile names like “All-Star Member”. Badges incentivise further participation.
Hashtag Holidays
Capitalise on popular recurring hashtag holidays like #FollowFriday or #WayBackWednesday, which occurs weekly. Tailor content to align with hashtag themes and embed tags to maximise discovery beyond existing followers.
Common X Marketing Mistakes to Avoid.
Here are some common X marketing mistakes to avoid in 2024:
Not Having a Strong Brand Handle & Profile.
Your X handle and profile set first impressions, so ensure they align with your brand identity and communicate precisely what you do. Choose a handle with your company name or a close variation without random numbers/letters. Use your logo and colour scheme on your profile. Have a clear, benefit-focused tagline and link to your website.
Automating All Tweets
While automation has its place (more on that later), over-automation causes followers to disengage. Maintain a human touch by tweeting daily in real time about relevant happenings. Share consumer insights and react to feedback manually. Automate sparingly to supplement human tweets.
Failing to Optimise Images
Simply tweeting text falls flat compared to pairing messaging with compelling images. Yet many brands use random stock photos that feel disconnected from the accompanying tweet copy. Ensure your pictures integrate seamlessly with copy meaning. Invest in custom graphics and photography tied directly to tweet themes that will catch the eye.
Not Monitoring Mentions & Messages
It’s social media malpractice to ignore brand mentions and followers' direct messages (DMs). Set up notifications and respond to every single DM within 24 hours tops. Quickly reply to followers, mentioning your handle and thanking them for their support. Listening and engaging shows you value community members.
Aggressive Self-Promotion
There’s a place for promoting your latest content and products via X. But too aggressive self-promotion leaves followers feeling manipulated, not served. Follow the 80/20 rule: tweet sharing other expert content 80% of the time, 20% about your offerings at max. Provide value first, seamless promotion second.
Not Optimising Paid Campaigns
Many brands launch X ads without enough preparatory work, leading to sky-high CPCs and minimal ROI. Invest ample time into crafting customised audiences and creatives and target cost-per-action rates for paid campaigns before deploying at scale based on meaningful KPIs. Monitor and optimise weekly.
Buying Fake Followers
Fake followers tank credibility and engagement rates when the temptation to take shortcuts and instantly inflate follower counts via bot networks persists. Protect integrity by only employing white hat growth tactics focused on nurturing real, invested human followers over time. Quality over quantity wins big.
Not Tracking Performance
The biggest X marketing mistake is the need for a measurement plan. Establish performance benchmarks upfront and implement analytics tracking via dashboards. Review metrics like weekly follower growth, engagement rates per tweet, site clicks generated, and sales pipeline influenced monthly without ongoing optimisation based on complex data; progress stalls fast.
Expert X Tips & Tactics for 2024
Here are some X tips from experts.
Embrace Emojis 😎
Emojis entice the eyes while conveying emotions that text fails to transmit. Sprinkle related emojis into tweets (just a few) for added oomph and engagement.
Ask More Questions ❓
Tweets posed as intriguing questions drive curiosity and responses much better than statements alone. Craft one weekly question to spark dialogue, such as “What do you wish more brands understood about customers like you?”
First Comment on Trending Tweet 💬
Monitor rising tweet threads, not just Trends. Be the first to provide an insightful, value-added comment on tweets from leaders gaining significant traction in your niche. This exposure widens reach.
Pin Killer Tweets 📌
Pin (pinning keeps them atop your profile) evergreen power tweets that position your brand’s purpose, products or content offerings. Refresh pinned tweets monthly for perpetual visibility.
Curate X Lists 🤹
X Lists featuring the most influential accounts, leading brand handles and up-and-coming voices in your industry provide a content channel followers can’t get enough of. Lists establish your expertise while directing eyeballs.
Frugal Paid Approach 💰
Even tiny $5 to $10 daily X ad budgets go shockingly far, thanks to precise targeting capabilities. Test numerous micro-campaigns in 2024 tailored to unique buyer segments rather than massive generic pushes—nano-target prospects where competitors are weakest.
Essential X Marketing Tools
Rounding out this extensive X guide, let’s explore my favourite X tools and apps.
Hootsuite – The social media management dashboard allows SMBs and solopreneurs to efficiently manage multiple X accounts and Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn pages from one centralised hub. Schedule tweets in advance, collaborate with teams and track unified analytics.
Sprout Social is an all–in–one social media analytics powerhouse for X and beyond. It features social listening, reporting, messaging advocacy tools, and CRM integration. Sprout makes community engagement, campaign management, and ROI connections effortless.
Tweetdeck – This free X tool for real-time tracking curates customisable columns so brands can segment X activity. Monitor tweets about your products, hashtags, influencers in your space, X lists and more from a consolidated command centre.
Rival IQ – Track your brand’s social presence and hashtag usage relative to competitors over time via Rival IQ. Benchmark where you rank regarding X community size plus post volume and amplification rates for tactical adjustments required to pull ahead.
X Media Studio – Forget third-party designing tools. X Media Studio allows the creation of sleek, polished images, GIFs and videos all from within the platform—no graphics chops needed. Stock imagery, custom text and logos, engaging visuals ready for tweeting in 1-click.
Commun.it – X community management app empowers brands to identify key influencers and directly connect with power followers. Turn supporters into evangelists by empowering them to refer others—rewards fuel referrals.
Followerwonk – Want to expand X followers in your niche? Followwonk helps discover accounts to target plus analyse existing followers/circles through social graph intelligence. Uncover opportunities via more profound audience research.
X Business Model
While X’s long-term future outlook under Musk remains in flux, his takeover should usher in new monetisation priorities, catapulting revenue models for power players embracing the platform’s advertising, data and subscription stack more fully.
Here is how X makes money as we head toward 2024:
- Social Media Advertising: Accounts for over 90% of X revenue still today through various ad placements tailored by objective and format—promoted tweets, accounts, trends, plus pre-roll/mid-roll video ads.
- Subscriptions: X Blue monthly subscription offering additional functionality, including custom app colours, profile organising tools and customer support, starts at $2.99/month. Verification via Blue expands in 2023, along with easier account switching, potentially alienating some users while luring commercial players. Additional tiers are rumoured.
- Commerce: X drives impressive upstream sales for ecommerce brands using Shopify and other integrations where shopping happens externally while X serves discovery and deal distribution—in-platform checkouts expanding, including X Shops.
- Data Licensing: X provides its entire archive of public tweets to corporations and researchers willing to pay handsomely for data-mining access to global real-time conversations, trends and insights via products like X Developer API and Gnip data feed.
Conclusion
Winning at X marketing is no longer optional for ambitious small businesses—it’s imperative. When leveraged strategically as part of your broader digital marketing approach, X drives measurable business growth.
By taking time to analyse competitors, craft an insights-led strategy, create engaging content, build an invested community and track analytics, small brands can maximise ROI from X marketing investments in 2024 and beyond.
Focus on continually providing followers with tangible value, not just selling to them. Treat community members like partners invested in your brand journey. With this community mindset and relentless optimisation based on data, small businesses will soar to new heights with X.
