How We Doubled Our Twitter Engagement Rate
Keeping up with social media is a 24-hour grind. And I don’t just mean posting and responding to followers, I mean keeping up with changes to the actual platform, learning how to get the most out of it, and modifying your strategy accordingly.
Facebook is a great example. Posting images used to be the leading way to get more reach, but now that’s changed and the recommended style is link-share posts. In fact, some studies even suggest that text-based posts are now getting more reach than photos!
Well, similar to what we try to do with Facebook, we tweaked our strategies on Twitter and found something that clicked. Here are three ways we recently doubled our engagement rate. Engagement Rate as defined by Twitter is the number of clicks, retweets, replies, follows and favorites divided by the total number of impressions.
1. Use More Images
This is an easy one to start with if you’re tweeting about content that already has an image. We include an image with almost every tweet that’s about one of our blog posts. The visual cue makes it easier for your followers to take an action. Comparing one month’s worth of tweets where we used only five images to another month’s where we used over 80, our engagement rate more than doubled.
If the piece of content you’re tweeting about doesn’t already have an image and you’re not able to create one with the tools are your disposal, there are numerous resources online where you can find images for free or where you can create your own.
2. It’s Okay to Post the Same Thing Multiple Times
Despite what you may think, it’s okay to post the same thing twice, or three times…or lots of times. Just make sure you space out the posts. For instance, last year we wrote a blog post about the best times to post on social media. We tweeted about it regularly at first, and now we tweet about it roughly every two weeks or so. It gets a good response almost every time. We do however recommend changing the language in the tweet and if possible the image.
What makes this work? Two things: 1) the nature of evergreen content, and 2) the rapid pace at which social networks like Twitter move. There’s so much noise on Twitter these days that not everyone is going to see and interact with your content the first time you post it.
3. Be Sure to Respond
This isn’t something particularly groundbreaking, but it’s still important to remember. If you’re a Community Manager doing social day in and day out, it’s easy to slip into automation mode, which can put the human element at risk.
Don’t forget there are people on the other end of your posts, and that taking the time to put something thoughtful together makes them following you a more valuable part of their day. It’s also worth your time to respond to people best you can when they engage. This can be hard to scale if you have a large following, but it’s one of the best ways to grow a community online.
You can also increase opportunities for your content to be distributed by using share tools, and to grow your followers by using personalized marketing tools that detect when a visitor comes to your site from a social network.
How are you tweaking your Twitter Strategy? We’d love to hear!
This blog post was originally published on the AddThis blog.
