All great videos have two things in common: It takes lots of time to create them and, in most cases, they end up being under-marketed on social media.

This has never made much sense to me: Businesses seem to be investing a lot of money in creating brand-owned content, yet its marketing is often overlooked.

Therefore my answer to the ever-popular questions – “How much content should we be publishing on a monthly basis?” – has always been: “Exactly as much as you can afford to promote well”.

This article is a checklist for using only one social media platform – Twitter – to promote each of your videos on social media. It also gives you a good idea of how it must be done on each social media network.

1. Create Tweet Schedule

Here’s one thing you need to remember about Tweets: They don’t live long. There have been all kinds of research into this with one of the most optimistic insights coming from Moz years ago. It claimed the lifespan of a Tweet is about 18 minutes.

Now imagine how few of your followers are even on Twitter within this time frame at any given moment? Even if you have thousands of followers, count on as many as ~10 of them being there to see your tweet once you publish it.

That’s why scheduling the same message to go out at different times of the days is so essential for Twitter. MavSocial has tools that make it incredibly easy and effective to re-purpose tweets on Twitter:

Schedule a minimum of three tweets to get published on different days of the week, at different times of the day to catch more of your audience online.

2. Involve Your Whole Team

The more of your team is involved in tweeting, the more diverse your Twitter marketing tactics are going to be. The most powerful form of digital marketing is collaborative marketing.

When it comes to Twitter, there are two powerful ways you can involve your whole team into promoting your brand asset:

2.1 Use ContentCal Pinboard

ContentCal is another great tool that can turn quite useful here. The tool allows your team members to add social media updates to a “Pinboard” for you (or your moderator) to review and schedule them for publication on your brand-owned social media channels.

The beauty of this approach is that ContentCal gives everyone within your company a voice without sacrificing on content quality that goes live on your social media channels (since all social media updates go through a moderation process as an extra level of quality assurance).

Let your team contribute social media updates to your shared “Pinboard” for the moderator to spread them around your Twitter schedule.

As a result, your company tweets will look much more diverse and creative since more than one person will be involved in writing them.

2.2 Engage Your Team in Promoting Your Promoters

Agorapulse is a great tool for collaborative reputation management, allowing your whole team to interact with tweets mentioning your brand and participate in relevant discussions:

• Encourage your team to monitor related discussions on Twitter where your content asset may turn useful whenever they can
• Have your various team members retweet and like Tweets promoting your content asset on Twitter to increase the reach of each individual one

There are a few more social media platforms that offer similar functionality so that you can browse around.

3. Submit to Viral Content Bee

Viral Content Bee is the tool I founded but it’s also the tool I am using for any single content marketing campaign I am involved in.

Viral Content Bee works as the mutual help platform where members meet to help push one other’s content on Twitter (as well as other platforms, including Pinterest, Tumblr, and more).

VCB is manually moderated to ensure content quality, so it’s also a curation tool. Members are also highly encouraged to interact with each tweet they generate to their content through VCB by retweeting, liking, and following, so it’s also a good way to grow your Twitter interactions and followers:

Engage with each tweet promoting your content for better reach.

4. Use Diverse Hashtags

Using hashtags is a good way to increase your reach beyond your immediate Twitter following. However, you cannot use too many hashtags within one tweet as hashtags are clickable, so they may steal clicks from your content link.

I suggest using no more than 1-2 hashtags per post and vary them with each tweet. I usually encourage my content writers to create a rough list of related hashtags (for later use on both Twitter and Instagram) when doing content and keyword research.

Keyword clustering is a great way to identify and group keywords when preparing your content marketing brief. It allows you to identify more ways the same concept can be put into words. This helps me create better-optimized content as well as come up with more hashtags for social media marketing purposes:

All different ways people express the same thing: This is a great source of hashtag inspiration! Keyword clustering allows my team to discover more ways the same concept can be described in words. This fuels both the writing process and the social media wording.

5. Ask Questions

Wording your social media updates in a question format is a great way to increase engagement (and clicks). People have that natural instinct forcing them to get instantly curious and start looking for an answer the moment they read a question. This prompts clicks and comments.

This human reaction to a written question can (and should) be successfully applied to social media copywriting.

Whenever crafting a social media update, try and word it in an interrogative form, providing your URL as an answer.

Great questions trigger clicks: Asking questions on Twitter is a great way to get your followers intrigued enough for them to click the link!

Again, I am doing my question research when still writing content, so by the time it’s ready to be promoted, I have a good list ready to craft engaging social media updates.

For question research, I use TextOptimizer, which is a semantic analysis tool that generates a list of popular questions for any query you put in.

There are so many ways to make use of these questions, including answering them in-content, asking them on social media to improve engagement, incorporating them in your newsletter, using them to create visuals, etc.

It’s also a smart idea to combine asking questions and tweeting a clear call-to-action inviting clicks:

You don’t want to overdo with “click here” CTAs inside tweets but once in a while, it’s ok.

This article lists even more possible CTAs you can use in your tweets for more clicks (again, don’t overdo!):

6. Create Diverse Content Formats

Twitter loves visual content. This includes visual quotes, mini-videos, animated GIFs, etc. Diversifying visual content going with your tweets is a great way to generate more exposure.

When promoting your video on Twitter, I don’t go too crazy with visual content though: Like hashtags, these visual assets can steal clicks. Many of your followers will choose to engage with an image or a video instead of clicking the link, so I prefer to use Twitter cards:

If you use Twitter cards, clicking the image will open your page. If you upload an image to Twitter, clicking it will expand the thumbnail stealing clicks from your content. Don’t upload media each time you tweet your link. But from time to time experiment with uploading visuals to build more engagement.

But I do put together a couple of well-branded assets for increased exposure. On the plus side, I can re-use these on other social media channels, so this effort is never wasted. I use the following free tools to quickly put together visual assets to market my content on Twitter and beyond:

• Adobe Spark for stunning social media images and visual quotes (using free images from Google)
• Wave.video is a great video maker allowing you to create social media trailers in minutes:

Create video teasers (i.e. short entertaining video clips) to promote on Twitter using Wave.video!

7. Monitor Your Results

Finally, you cannot possibly improve what you are not measuring, so closely monitoring your Twitter traffic and whether you are seeing any positive patterns is a must here.

For web analytics, I like to use Finteza because it’s very easy to set up. It also provides lots of insight into on-site user engagement and behavior. If you set up Ad Zones on your site, you will also be able to see how different types of your audience interact with your ads (which is what I am doing):

Obviously, Finteza needs to be set up beforehand for it to collect data on your Twitter visits.

To filter traffic analysis to a particular source:

• Go Sources -> Social and click Twitter
• From now on, any other report you open will be filtered by this referral source, including events, Ad Zones, geography, etc.:

Finteza allows you to better understand your Twitter audience and want engages them best. Check your Twitter traffic on a regular basis.

Bonus: Promote Your Video on Your Site

Apart from using Finteza’s advertising features, you can also use chatbot marketing to engage your on-site audience with your video content. Alter is the easiest chatbot marketing software that requires no technical knowledge to set up and customize.

To get Alter to promote your video, proceed Sites -> Bot Messages and put your video link:

You can also customize which type of your site audience you want Alter to show the message to. I prefer to serve the message to return visitors.

It is also a great idea to use your opt-in list to generate more social media shares from your newsletter subscribers.

Takeaways: How to Make the Most of Video Promotion on Twitter

• Schedule several tweets to go on different days of the week at different time slots to catch more of your Twitter followers online.
• Engage your whole team in crafting creative tweets using tools like ContentCal. This way you’ll end up testing diverse wording and techniques
• Encourage your team to get involved in social media listening for them to participate in related Twitter discussions, as well as like and retweet other people’s tweets promoting your content
• Use Viral Content Bee to get your content tweeted by powerful Twitter users outside of your immediate circle. Engage with those tweets to increase their reach and build your community
• Use keyword clustering to come up with diverse hashtags to include in your tweets. Don’t use more than 1-2 hashtags as they may steal clicks
• Phrase your Tweets as questions and provide your link as an answer. Questions spur curiosity and prompt people to click to find out answers. TextOptimizer is a great tool for question research
• Create visual assets for your tweets to attract more attention. Don’t overdo with these as they may also steal clicks. Create one micro-video and one image to promote your content on Twitter (as well as other social media channels) using free tools like Wave.video
• Use Alter and Finteza to engage your site visitors in promoting your video! You can use both tools to encourage your site users to share the video on Twitter!

Obviously, if you see any particular tweet to spread (through likes and retweets), consider investing in ads to push it further.

And what’s your Twitter promotion routine? Feel free to share your favorite tools and tips!