What are your goals for your Company presence on Twitter? Are you posting regularly but not finding any momentum? There are many companies on Twitter that have a few hundred followers but aspire for more. Here are some tips to alleviate that malaise and integrate your Twitter efforts into your content plan.
A dedicated publishing calendar is a good start towards interaction, but we need to take that a step further with some details. A lot of time is spent on crafting posts and scheduling them with the hope that people will notice and take action. It’s not addressing the secret behind
Twitter growth and that is engagement. Let’s talk about 5 ways that you can get people to engage with your brand’s posts.
Stepping back to think like your customers and prospects can be very helpful. If you have personas, refer to those and think about that groups’ pain points and habits. What information are they interested in? What format of content are they interested in? Thinking like a customer is the first step to connecting with them.
1. Content Calendar
The first place to focus is on the content calendar. Take a look at what you already have, and determing what types of messaging you are using. Use the customer-centric approach and consider themes for some of the days of the week that might drive engagement with your brand. Would Technical Tuesday offer tidbits of information that people would respond to? #TBT stands for Throwback Thursday and its a popular trend across many different
social platforms -- would it be fun to take a step back in time and talk about the good old days? Should Wednesday be thought leadership? You know best what your audience is interested in. Remember that asking a question encourages people to respond. People will follow an interesting brand presence on Twitter.
2. Hashtags
Now that you have the content calendar jazzed up with some themes, let’s talk about hashtags. Hashtags are used for tracking topics. The secret to hashtags is to use the ones that your audience is using. It is not about using hashtags that you’re creating. People use hashtags to track conversations around a topic such as #cloudsecurity #sharepoint2016, etc. If you can use hashtags that others are tracking it’s a home run because you’ll be flowing your messages into what they’re watching and care about. This can exponentially increase your reach and engagement! There are a
number of tools that can be used to research hashtags. Another trick is to review the ones that influencers and analysts are using. We’ll be making lists of them so read on!
3. Images
Images are another key to getting your tweets noticed. Studies show that posts with images get 40 - 60% more views. Edit the campaign graphics to size and you have a perfect way to expand your campaign. An interesting photo is always a good bet. You can use a phrase or bullets on a background image. Get creative and mix it up! Your audience will appreciate it.
4. Lists
So far we’ve only been talking about others taking actions of following you, retweeting or favoriting your tweet. You can use your brand’s Twitter account to signal others in a couple of ways. Lists are under used. Twitter allows you to create lists of influencers, analysts or just plain old lovers of your brand. Once you create lists, other people can follow them. People are notified when they’re added to lists.
5. Polls
The final suggestion is the poll or survey option. This can be added to the content calendar or just used randomly. People enjoy weighing in and can see how others have voted. Keep the question and options simple and people will participate. Pinning the survey to the top will keep it front and center.
I hope these ideas inspire you to strive for more engagement on Twitter. The use of images and #hashtags on a regular basis will incrementally grow your presence. What additional ideas do you have?