Twitter is an ever-growing platform and becoming more and more popular, especially with young people. Its formatting allows for a constant stream of information which is useful for businesses trying to entice customers, however, a character count forces you to be brief and informative in a small number of words. Should you use this to your benefit it will be a huge feature for growth of your businesses online presence, here we will give you tips on how to use your Twitter to maximise your following!
The Benefits of gaining more Twitter Followers:
Whether you are just starting in the world of Twitter or you are just looking for some tips to bolster your following everyone is looking for the same thing, ways to get more followers. The key thing to remember is that more followers mean more engagement and a higher follow count increases your influence and reach that you have in the industry so make yourself friendly and approachable online.
Not only does this mean you have more influence but it shows to; yourself, new followers and current clients that what you have to say is engaging and that your audiences are interested in what you have to say.
Most importantly for businesses, however, Social Media can be used as an excellent advertising tool and with 47% of marketers agreeing Twitter was the best social media channel for customer engagement then this is a channel that you want to be focusing on.
So here are our 6 tips to help improve your Twitter presence:
Tweet Regularly
Unlike on other Social Media where people shy away from posting too many times in a day, on Twitter, it is in fact encouraged. Twitter’s format allows for a constant stream of information and therefore this allows for you to be consistently updating your following with relevant information.
While this constant stream of conversation might sound appealing to some of you, if you are focusing on your business don’t get ahead of yourself. While there is the availability of a more regular approach to your social media activity you do not want to become repetitive, at the end of the day you are still advertising a product and too much of the same thing will get repetitive to your audience and an unfollow is an easy action to take.
In fact research from the Social Media Examiner suggests that the sweet spot is somewhere between 1 and 4 times a day.
So ready your Tweets and prepare to be active, but one of the most important parts of your daily routine might actually be in preparation.
Tweet on time!
While there isn’t a Twitter opening and closing time, if you don’t plan your Tweets, your engagement could be a tiny version of the potential your account holds.
If you spend more than 5 minutes Googling the best times to post online you will get a whole range of times from a whole range of sources, the answer really is to see how your own Twitter feels.
The general consensus is that activity comes in waves, some suitable morning times are when people are on their way to work or on their break (9am/12midday) because any chance anyone can get to log onto their phone, it appears, they will take it.
The most active time for interaction on Twitter, however, appears to be between 5 and 6pm weekdays. This research also identified that out of all the weekdays Wednesday is the most active day on twitter! So get your important information out then.
How? You might ask, if like most people you are busy Monday to Friday then there is a way around this problem. Apps such as Hootsuite take the stress of planning your Tweets away from you as you can schedule them weeks before. Plan out your posts and get them prepared, this allows for regular posts that don’t spam the timeline and most importantly can be posted at the perfect interaction period!
The use of apps such as Hootsuite allows you to ensure you are still pumping out business updates even in out-of-office times and weekends and you must not forget about your weekends! Forbes post that there is 17% more engagement on a weekend and it shows a personal touch from your social media accounts, highlighting your availability.
Be Active
You might think that this has already been covered, but you would be wrong. Being active isn’t about just constantly pumping out your own Tweets but instead, it is about your online presence.
Almost all businesses have Twitter accounts nowadays and a lot of them are starting to have a good online presence with regards to their own posts. We are sure you have all experienced some bad customer service online, this is what you need to avoid.
It is easy to sit back book your tweets in on Hootsuite and almost forget that your Twitter exists but this will damage your social media influence, this is where being active comes into play.
Make your account open for DMs so people can message you queries, questions and god forbid complaints. This makes you open to your customers and available to help them with anything that they need.
With Twitter being online for everyone to see, you also need to ensure that you stay on top of replying to peoples Tweets. Everyone in the world can see you ignoring someone who says that the product that they bought from your company is broken, this is not good.
Instead of replying to them and helping them out ensures that people enjoy the experience they have with you and with customers spending 20-40% more money with companies who engage with them on social media, this can never be a bad thing.
Learn 14 ways to use Twitter to market your business
Don’t Be A Robot
There is a difference in being interactive and doing a lot of posts and this is something important to remember. As shown already anyone can be programme a Tweet to be written and with as many as 48 million accounts on twitter being bots it is important to identify to your followers early that you are a real person that they can have human interactions with.
Replying to DMs and Tweets as previously highlighted is a step in the right direction to be able to identify you from the machines! But there is still work to do.
There is a lot of accounts on social media that you can look at and hope to replicate or at least use them as a guideline. Paddy Power has propelled themselves into the forefront of social media success by using this approach of not being robotic.
Paddy Power posts a lot of humorous tweets that target the ‘sports’ kind of audience, depending on your product it is important to direct your content towards your audience in a way that will appeal to them.
With constant updates across all of the social media, it isn’t difficult to include CTA in your posts; the use of polls, memes, hashtags all make your posts shareable and promote intractability, think of each retweet as a free advertisement.
Be Visual
One of the easiest ways to encourage interaction is through the use of visuals or to put it even simpler, the more basic the Tweet, often, the more interaction it can get.
To begin the use of videos, photos and tweets with links in are shared much more regularly than any other tweet, furthermore, the use of tweets with less than 110 characters are shared more regularly than those 110+. This shows, with Twitter having a youth-dominated demographic, simple is more.
Not only do Tweets with links get 86% more retweets than those without, images themselves are vastly more sharable worldwide than text as there is no language barrier with an image. If images are sharable then images are an advertisement and on top of this; infographics get shared up to 3X more than regular images, so get creative when thinking of what to tweet and try and prompt sharing.
And even if they don’t get shared, they take up more space on the screen than text does and that little bit more attention paid to your post could result in a wider following.
More sharing more followers!
Hashtags
With regards to hashtags, the most important thing to do is not overuse them, hashtag… but not too much.
Take time and think of an effective hashtag before posting it onto your social media profiles, this can be used to find your product and advertise your company very effectively. By adding a hashtag to your profile you are adding another way of people searching or finding your company on their social media pages, therefore, encouraging new followers and interactivity.
When using hashtags try and use 1-2 in your posts and keep on using them, by maintaining their usage you are encouraging your followers to use the same hashtag, this can broaden your following and gain new customers.
While this might sound fantastic you do need to be careful, too many hashtags and people will scroll straight past thinking that you are a spam account. Also, too much blue on your Tweets just can’t really be taken seriously as it looks like you’re trying that little bit too hard.
Try out a few different hashtags and see how they work on your own audience, once you know what works and what doesn’t you will be able to move your campaigns forward.
But how do we know which hashtags are getting the best interaction? Easily, through the use of Twitter Analytics, you can get a whole range of information about your followers and the way that they interact with your posts that you probably never even knew existed. The use of Twitter analytics which is easily accessible on your twitter profile gives you a complete breakdown of the demographics of people that follow you and how they interact with your posts. Be aware of what your audience likes and you will be able to direct your posts much clearer.
To draw everything together is to really tell you that the best thing you can do for your companies Twitter to gain attention is to just go out and be active.
Firstly this makes you more open to your customers, shows that you are involved and there to help but it also allows for you to work out what works for your companies demographic. Get a feel for what they find funny and what they share through both twitter analytics but also just being aware of your social presence. Use the tools that are made readily available to you online to make sure that your social presence is what you are hoping for it to be and the twitter following will follow.
What’s next?
Book your free 15-minute strategy call to see how you can make Twitter work for your business.