The big dilemma for all brands’ Twitter accounts is how to engage with their followers. It is all very well having 500,000 followers but if you’re only engaging, connecting and communicating with 5% of them, you’re alienating a huge percentage of your audience.
Cooper (2013) found that engagement rates with a brand’s Twitter account increased by 17% on weekends, however, due to the Monday to Friday, 9-to-5 work template, brands were not capitalising, with just 19% of brands tweeting at the weekend.
It’s great if you have a brilliant advert, offer or amusing viral content to share, however, if you are tweeting during times that your following are working, you won’t get the exposure or engagement you deserve. Therefore, implementing a 24:7 social media strategy is a must, with an upweight in content during the weekends.
What would you rather see? A gif of a dog chasing a butterfly? Or 140 characters describing a dog chasing a butterfly? Tweets with images, videos and GIFs were found to have twice as much engagement than those with just text.
So, you’ve got your image-based tweets scheduled in for the weekend; the next step is working on the basis of ‘less is more’. Cooper’s research also found that tweets with no more than 100 characters had 17% more engagement.
One of Twitter’s greatest selling points is the ability to track hashtags – using basic Twitter analytics and/or software such as TweetReach can be very insightful and beneficial to the analyse your exposure – and, using a hashtag, has seen engagement grow by more than a fifth. However, it is important to make the hashtag relevant because your followers are using the hashtag to connect to a topic that interests them.
Still following? – see what I did there?!
It may seem simple and it may seem a little ‘needy’, however, by simple putting ‘Retweet’ into your tweets, engagement goes through the roof with 12x more interaction.
So, to sum everything up:
- Time your tweets: grab your followers whilst they’re scrolling Twitter to help pass the time during their arduous commute or relaxing in their garden at the weekend.
- Use images, vines, videos, GIFs; basically, anything that will bring your tweets to life.
- Get to the point, don’t use three words when one will do.
- If you want something, just ask: “Please Retweet”
- Hashtags help users relate to their topic of interest but make sure it’s relevant.
