How to Increase Engagement with Your Followers on Twitter

What is it that makes Twitter a worthwhile enterprise? Engagement, that’s what. To see a real return on any investment in social media you need to look at whether or not people are engaging with your Twitter profile. If they’re not, then here are a few tips designed to boost engagement.

Keep it short and sweet

It’s impossible to post an essay in a single tweet on Twitter because of the character limit but you’ll see a rise in engagement if you limit your tweets to 110 characters, rather than the full 140. Avoid using a series of tweets to get your message across too – save longer updates for other social platforms such as Facebook, which accommodate length better.

Tweet when your followers are awake

It seems obvious but, unless you have very dedicated followers who will specifically go to your timeline to look at what you’ve said, then you need to time your tweets to appear in Twitter feeds when people are looking at them. For most of us, this is between the hours of 8am and 7pm, but if you’re targeting audiences overseas then bear in mind the time differences.

Quality is as important as quantity

Many businesses focus on getting themselves into followers’ feeds as much as possible but this can actually have a detrimental effect. Limit your tweets to five per day and focus the rest of your time on responding to DMs and engaging with other peoples’ activity.

Get visual

Engagement with photos is much more predictable then text only tweets, particularly if it’s an image that people will want to retweet onto their own timelines. Tweets that feature images win hands down on the engagement front against those that don’t. As well as stills, Twitter also allows the upload of video clips of 30 seconds in length, which can be even more eye catching than a simple image.

Steer clear of dull narcissism

Unless you’re a celebrity, no one is really interested in whether or not you’ve had a bad day or you feel tired and using these kind of drab personal emotions in a business profile is a fast track to turning off your followers (and potentially losing them). Instead, focus on professional information delivery, or get personal but be interesting – for example, link your emotive tweet to an event or news headline so that there is something for people to engage with. The only real response to a tweet such as ‘I’m tired’ is ‘poor you’ and Twitter isn’t exactly a forum for sympathetic strangers.

Don’t abuse hash tags

Followers often find hash tags off putting – mostly if you’re using more than two at a time. While hash tags in tweets can be an easy way to gather new followers, steer clear of making a tweet appear like a calculating move to attract as much attention as possible and instead work on relevant and entertaining content that existing followers will appreciate too.

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