We have a theory that a person’s social media site of choice reflects their personality type. Are you a little introverted? Working behind a desk all day? Love to read articles and blog posts and share with your friends? Twitter may be for you.

The following Twitter tips are not the generic tips you’ve probably come across before. We’ve compiled this list based on things we see in the Twitter food world often. 

Twitter Tips for Food Businesses

Fill out ALL the details of your profile including your city and URL. You want to look legit. Be sure to include your company name in your bio, too.

Does your cover image and profile look correct? Twitter changes their image requirements periodically. We’re noticing a lot of Twitter profiles without a proper profile image these days.

Don’t “favorite” your own posts. That’s lame.

Don’t follow bots or spam accounts, and never EVER buy followers or allow spam accounts to follow you. Spam is like a cold. If you don’t wash your hands of those germs, spammers will follow your friends, too. Select the gear icon and choose to either “block” or “report” accounts that are obviously not real people or organizations.

One of the best ways to get followers is to follow other accounts. But, there are a couple things to consider. Twitter limits the number of accounts you can follow at a time, and if your following-to-follower ratio is way off balance, you will look like spam at first glance.

Don’t follow political or any polarizing accounts. When running your food business, you want everything you do to stay on-brand and not risk turning-off your customers, and that includes the company you keep on Twitter. If you really want to follow some of those accounts, you have two choices. 1. Unfollow and include in a private list. 2. Open a personal account where you can interact without your company name attached to it.

Unless your competitors are friends, organize competing businesses in a private Twitter list. No need to follow them either.

We’re big fans of public and private Twitter lists. Create a public list to include your retailers and fans and private lists to organize local media, national media, bloggers, events, favorite accounts, industry influencers, etc. This way when you land on Twitter you’re not faced with a big huge news stream. Instead, you can look at specific categories of info to make interaction simpler and more focused.

Monitor all mentions of your business, not just those that include your handle in their tweet. This includes your business name and any relevant hashtags. Use the Twitter search function to check up on things periodically and also set-up a tool like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to notify you of mentions. (Note: our experience with automated tools is that they don’t catch 100% of mentions. You need to use the Twitter search function to double check.)

If someone mentions you favorably on Twitter, it’s perfectly ok to favorite, retweet, and reply! Show your gratitude without hesitation.

If someone mentions you negatively, reply with an understanding tweet. Ask them to take the conversation off social media and provide an email address. In your reply, don’t put any text before their handle. (This prevents the tweet from appearing in the general stream. It only goes to the person you direct it to.)

Don’t forget your hashtags, but don’t go crazy. One to two is enough for a single Tweet. And, please, PLEASE, don’t use #foodporn. That ship has sailed.

food biz twitter tipsUpdate often and with a variety of content. The beauty of Twitter is the opportunity for conversation. Whatever you can do strike up conversations and make friends, the more value you will get out of it. Don’t only publish links to your website or latest promotion. Instead, support your fans and colleagues with valuable, fun info.

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! All of web marketing is about pictures, including Twitter and especially food-related tweets. Recommended image size for Twitter posts is  2:1 and no bigger than 1024:512.

One last tip. It’s ok to sync up your Facebook and Instagram with Twitter, but remember that the images of those posts won’t appear on Twitter. And, if your Instagram and Facebook posts are the only posts that appear on your account, then you aren’t likely to get new followers since you look dormant.

What other tips would you like to share?

Sara Lancaster

About Sara Lancaster

Sara is The Condiment Marketing Co.’s founder and creative director. She oversees client relationships, strategic marketing plans, as well as a bit of copywriting and social media management.