Twitter is one of those social media platforms that works well for everything, from building relationships to lead generation. It is not easy though. It’s fast and overwhelming, and it’s too easy to get buried in millions of updates that go live there. So you’re probably wondering how to increase Twitter engagement and squeeze more out of your Tweets.
Even though Twitter is the most public and flexible platform out there, it is too easy to remain invisible there. So how to increase your engagement on Twitter? How to get your target audience to see your updates and talk back?
Here are seven tactics that will help you build your Twitter reach and engagement:
1. Schedule Recurring Tweets
There have been a number of research studies – all of them agreeing on one: The life of a single tweet is pretty short (about 30 minutes, if we are lucky).
That’s quite understandable, given the number of updates going live on Twitter every minute. Back in 2013, Twitter claimed there were about 5,700 Tweets published every second, on average. I bet, it’s many more these days!
So how to get more people to see your tweets?
You need to publish the same update a few times, especially if that update is important to you and your brand. That’s what the biggest brands are doing, publishing the same update a few times on their feeds to ensure they catch more of their audience online:
MavSocial has a feature for that called MavRepeater allowing you to easily schedule the same update to go live several times:
The feature works best for:
- Promoting evergreen content on Twitter
- Making sure your updates are seen by a global audience (across different time zones)
- Promoting regular and recurring events (such as weekly Twitter chats, monthly webinars, etc.)
2. Ask Questions on Twitter
Asking a question is one of the best ways to generate engagement, both on and off Twitter. The thing is, human beings have a natural reflex to pause to find an answer, whenever they are confronted with a question.
Questions are powerful. Not only does hearing a question affect what our brains do in that instant, it can also shape our future behavior. And that’s a powerful principle that can be applied in social media marketing.
To engage your Twitter audience, ask interesting questions regularly. These can be both ice-breaker questions (e.g. “What are your plans for the long weekend?”) and targeted questions (i.e. those that discuss challenges that your target audience is facing). To research the latter, use Text Optimizer, a semantic analysis tool that extracts related concepts from any given search query as well as help you identify popular questions on any given topic:
Hand these questions over to your social media managers for him/her to include them into your company’s social media editorial calendar!
3. Answer Questions on Twitter
It works both ways: You need to ask questions to engage your Twitter audience but you also need to be there to answer other people’s questions to get seen and known.
It takes time and you need to be always engaging with Twitter users for this strategy to work but if you do that right, you’ll see a lot of qualified leads coming your way from these efforts.
To make your life easier, here’s a nice trick I am using to monitor questions in my industry:
Twitter supports question operator allowing you to find what people are publicly asking on Twitter: Simply type “keyword ?” in Twitter search box. Do keep the space between your target keyword and the question mark.
Now, use MavSocial social listening feature to monitor those questions!
4. Use Viral Content Bee
Crafting engaging social media updates is the most fundamental and step to building your Twitter presence and increasing your social engagement. However, limiting yourself to your own channel only means missing out. You want other people to share your content on Twitter on a regular basis to really increase your Twitter reach and engagement.
Viral Content Bee is the free platform allowing content creators to bring their content forward for others to share.
Apart from getting your content shared on other people’s Twitter feeds, VCB also lets you increase your engagement. Any time your content is tweeted, Viral Content Bee invites you to engage with that tweet.
This way Viral Content Bee builds your Twitter engagement and following through getting your content shared. There’s really no losing here, you get known through your content and you connect to social media influencers after they already read and shared your content.
5. Upload Native Images and Videos
Social media sites love it when you put extra effort in creating beautiful engaging updates, and Twitter is no exception. Whenever you upload an image or a video to go with your update (versus linking to outside content), Twitter will try and show your update to more of your followers, which will increase your engagement.
On top of that, both videos and images do a good job catching the eyes of social media users, so they are much likelier to attract more attention than text-only tweets.
The good news is, social-media-friendly images and videos take minutes (and even seconds once you train your hand at that) to create. You can use the MavSocial digital library to find great images to publish on Twitter. And you can use the built-in editor to apply filters, add text, and more!
Here are additional ideas and tools:
- There’s a variety of platforms allowing you to download high-quality photography to add your message to.
- Finally, you can find great images available for re-use in Google
- There are lots of WordPress plugins allowing you to find and use images that can be tweeted
And of course, tools like Canva make it easy to create great images.
6. Bring Your Most Engaging Tweets Back!
It is always a smart idea to keep an eye on your Twitter analytics to identify your best-performing tweets. You need to understand what seems to work best to try and recreate that success.
But also there’s one rule to remember here: Engagement brings even more engagement for two reasons:
- People are simply likelier to participate in a discussion that is already going on (rather than being the first to comment)
- Social media platforms would get already-engaging updates in more feeds
To bring your best updates back into the spotlight, you can use either (or both) of the following tricks:
- Comment on your own tweet to encourage further discussion
- Retweet your own tweet with the comment
7. Re-Engage Those Users on Your Site
Finally, Twitter engagement is awesome, but ultimately most of us, marketers, want people to engage with our own site. So here’s a bonus trick: Use on-site re-targeting to get the most of those clicks that come from your Twitter efforts.
Finteza is the web analytics platform that offers a re-targeting option allowing you to create custom on-site campaigns. You can use the feature to create custom conversion funnels for your first-time Twitter visitors as well as for return visitors who previously expressed interest in certain content.
To create a new custom message for your Twitter audience, register a free Alter account and add a new message by navigating Websites -> Bot Messages
Conclusion
Regard your Twitter feed as a birthday party you’ve thrown for yourself. All guests are attending in your honor, but you still have a host’s responsibility to make them feel welcomed and keep them entertained.
Use the party analogy as your rule of thumb. Before you post, ask yourself whether you’d do a similar thing at a party. Will your update make the party better? Will it make your guests want to return?
Furthermore, if you invited your clients to a house party, you’d use the opportunity to bond socially with them in order to better your work relationship. You’d want them to associate your friendly personality with your work. You’d tone down your wildest behavior in order to make a good impression.
It all comes down to balancing entertaining campaign with being helpful and adding value to the community. You want to be an entertaining host while treating everyone with care and respect.
Using the tools above will help you catch more attention and even scale the process a bit. But there’s no tool out there that will help you to become a good party host everyone want to come back to.
