5 Ways to Improve Your Engagement on Twitter

Earlier this summer, Twitter reportedly reached a registered user base of half a billion people.  In total, users tweet over 400 million times a day.  With numbers such as these, it is clear that getting your company’s profile and tweets in front of a wider audience is absolutely possible, but it’s no easy task.  Recent studies have found several key factors that influence the level of engagement a brand receives on Twitter.  Let’s take a look at five easy-to-make adjustments that should produce noticeable results for your business’ Twitter presence.

Call-to-Action: As simple as it sounds, simply asking for a retweet within your tweet can have a profound effect on how many people pass along your message.  According to a recent Buddy Media report, “asking fans to retweet results in 12 times higher retweet rates than those not using the call to action.” The release of a new white paper, the announcement of big company news, and promotion of an upcoming webinar are three examples of tweet content that can benefit from a call-to-action.  Of course, if you add some variation of, “Retweet this!” to the end of every single one of your messages, people will be quick to hit the “unfollow” button.

Keep Tweets Under 100 Characters: I know what you’re thinking, “Really? 140 characters are too many? Seriously?” Twitter’s character limit already caters to our short attention spans, but social marketers should reign in their message length even further for increased “shareability.”  Buddy Media’s findings indicate that tweets under 100 characters have a 17% higher rate of engagement. One oft-ignored explanation for this statistic is that a shorter tweet allows your followers to add their own thoughts or reactions within the same message.  Ideally, this will facilitate a discussion of your content between the retweeter and their network.

Live-Tweet: Twitter’s Journalism and News Manager, Mark Luckie, recently said that a “concentrated number of tweets in a short time span…can increase your engagement 50 percent more than your expected baseline.” An industry conference, product launch, or public speaking event can provide an excellent platform through which to increase your reach.  Many conferences and conventions now promote event-specific hashtags.  Not only are these an excellent way to communicate what you are learning at the event to your followers, they can also provide an opportunity to network at the event itself.  Live-tweeting is one of the most effective ways to harness Twitter’s unique nature.

Link Out: While retweets and replies to your tweets that contain simple text are great, they do not facilitate as much overall engagement as those that include links to external material.  “Link clicks, Buddy found, account for 92 percent of all user interaction with tweets.”  Tweets that bring the reader to a landing page will foster deeper interaction with your company and its website, which should result in a higher number of qualified leads.  While you want your Twitter account to be interesting, you do not want it to be the only company material your audience encounters!

Use Hashtags, but Don’t Overdo It: Hashtags can be a great way to access individuals who have an interest in what your company offers, especially those new to the social space who do not have a wide network from which to receive retweets or referrals.  Buddy Media found that tweets including hashtags “receive two times more engagement than those without hashtags.”  However, those with more than two tags experienced a 17% drop in engagement.  Be selective with the hashtags you add.  You want them to be relevant to the particular tweet, but not so specific that no other tweets will share the tag.  Search for common SEO phrases within Twitter and see what topics are trending within your industry. Simply adding any and all popular tags to tweets with unrelated content will give your profile a “spammy” feel and should be avoided.

If you follow these pieces of advice, have a clear goal for your online activity, and produce relevant content, then you should see an increase in both your lead pipeline and social reach. Have any of these five tips worked particularly well for your company? What other strategies have you used to increase your engagement?