Using Twitter to Engage an Audience

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Best practices

Let's discuss some best practices for publishing on Twitter.

Pay attention

Take care and pay attention to everything that you tweet. Once published, tweets can’t be edited. If you notice and want to correct a mistake, the tweet needs to be deleted and reposted – and you will lose all resulting engagement on the original tweet. So be careful before publishing.

Engage

Twitter is a conversational platform, so be sure to engage in existing conversations to show that you're an active member of the community. Use hashtags to increase your discoverability and visibility across the platform.

Add geolocation

Consider adding a geolocation to your tweets where appropriate, to make sure that your tweet is more contextually relevant to an audience in that area.

Measure engagement

Use the tweet activity tool to measure user engagement with your tweets in real-time. You can compare your tweet activity with that of your followers and see how they trend over time. You can click on any tweet to get a detailed view of the number of retweets, replies, likes, follows, or clicks it receives. And you can get detailed insights into who your audience and engagers are, and even export your metrics.

Use link shorteners

Twitter character real estate is very precious. So be sure to use link shorteners to maximize tweet space.

Enhancing tweets

Marketers have several options when it comes to enhancing their tweets.

Visual assets

First, use visual assets wisely. Images and videos enhance tweet cut-through in the newsfeed and lead to higher engagement. You should always incorporate images when your tweets are related to promotional activity. However, it's not always necessary to use images – for example, when dealing with complaints or engaging in conversations. These are calls which you need to make yourself based on what's most appropriate in the situation.

Tweet series

You can keep people engaged by breaking your content up into a series of tweets that can be tweeted over time and lead towards an overall ‘reveal’ or outcome. Make sure the timing of the posts isn’t too far apart and the tweets are pushed out in a linear, sensible order, so people can understand the series.

The short attention spend on social media can sometimes mean that longer content isn't consumed as readily by Twitter users. However, summarizing the main points of longer social content and providing a link to the full report or blog is one tactic to encourage long-form content engagement on Twitter.

Feedback

There's nothing Twitter users like to do more than comment, talk about, or offer opinions on subjects of interest. So asking for feedback and providing polls significantly increases Twitter engagement with your brand and ideas.

Content curation

Content curation is using other people's content in your tweets and social posts. You can retweet other related content to borrow the ideas, to associate it with your brand, and to share it with your audience. Likewise, you can curate your own social content from other channels by adapting your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram posts for Twitter, and pull a suite of social content from your own and other brands into your Twitter offering.

Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to find what people are talking about and what's trending on Twitter. They allow you to categorize your Tweets into topical groups. They also allow you to track the interactions with your hashtags; that is, to track how many people are talking about your hashtags. This is a good way to build scale in conversations and brand engagements. You can also track performance to amplify future activity.