Building a Twitter Marketing Strategy After the SXSW Spike

Twitter spent its first several months as a curiosity mostly confined to the tech industry, but that changed at South by Southwest in March of this year, where usage on the service reportedly tripled during the festival, from around 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000. Conference organizers put Twitter displays in the hallways between sessions, and attendees started using it to coordinate meetups and share real-time reactions to panels. That’s the moment Twitter stopped being purely an internal experiment for early adopters and started looking like something with actual marketing potential. Here’s how to build a real presence on it.

Step 1: Claim your handle and write a real bio

This is still simple enough to do in an afternoon: register your business name if it’s available, and write a bio that sounds like a person, not a press release. Twitter’s entire format runs on brevity and personality, so a stiff, corporate bio stands out immediately, and not in a good way.

Step 2: Follow before you post

Before broadcasting anything, spend time following the people and accounts already active in your industry. Twitter’s format is conversational by design; showing up only to post one-way announcements ignores the actual mechanics of the platform. Reply to people, share things you didn’t write and get a feel for how the format works before you try to use it for marketing.

Step 3: Respect the 140-character constraint as a feature, not a limitation

The character limit, inherited from SMS, forces every post to be short and direct. Resist the urge to treat this as a problem to work around with abbreviations that make posts hard to read. The businesses doing this well are writing single, clear thoughts, not trying to cram a paragraph into a tweet.

Step 4: Use it for things that benefit from being real-time

Twitter’s advantage over a MySpace profile or a Facebook page is speed: a post shows up immediately, not after someone visits your page. That makes it well suited to things that are time-sensitive, a same-day announcement, a quick update, a response to something happening right now, rather than evergreen content that would work just as well posted anywhere else.

Step 5: Treat replies as the actual point

Because Twitter is still relatively small, the people who do use it tend to be engaged and easy to reach directly. A reply from a business to an individual customer’s post carries real weight precisely because the platform is intimate enough right now that it doesn’t feel automated. Don’t waste that; it likely won’t stay this personal forever as the audience grows.

Step 6: Keep the investment proportional to the audience size

Twitter’s audience is still a small fraction of MySpace’s or Facebook’s. It doesn’t warrant the same share of your time yet, but the SXSW spike is a real signal that adoption can move quickly once a format finds its moment. A modest, consistent presence now, built by someone who understands the platform, positions you well if that growth continues. Treat this as an investment in being ready, not as a channel that needs to carry meaningful volume today.