Best Practices for Twitter Growth and Engagement

Social media marketing allows you to steer the conversation about your brand, engage with your target audience, and convert new followers into loyal customers. However, your brand’s audience will behave differently on each social network making an all-in-one social media strategy tricky for growth and engagement. If you follow these best practices for Twitter, your business will be well on its way to achieving a thriving and active Twitter following.

Twitter Best Practices You Need to Know

Knowing how to use each social media platform best will significantly affect your success. Although some content will work on multiple platforms, you generally won’t get the results you want with a one-size-fits-all approach. Incorporate these best practices into your tailored Twitter marketing strategy to increase engagement and attract new followers.

Complete Your Business Profile

Even if you already have your Twitter account set up and active, you can benefit from optimizing your Twitter profile. Start with your Twitter handle; is it short and simple? It’s best to match it to your brand name, but if you can’t, make sure it has an obvious connection to your brand.

Incorporating keywords into your Twitter bio gives any visitors a glance at your brand and its purpose. You can even add a relevant hashtag that is meaningful to your brand. Additionally, don’t forget to add a link to a page on your website so your audience can easily find more information about your business!

Next, you’ll want to make sure your profile and header photo represent your company well; use your brand logo or a picture of your founder. You can spice things up later by changing your header image to reflect company culture or a current campaign.

Lastly, choose your best Tweet with lots of engagement to pin to the top of your profile. A pinned Tweet gives your target audience a chance to see the type of content they can expect from you.

Publish Original and Curated Content

Twitter copy should be short and sweet; it’s the nature of the platform. Twitter has a strict 280 character limit, but you shouldn’t need to use all of them. Keep your message concise and conversational.

A few other best practices to adhere to are:

• Don’t try to convey more than one thought in a single Tweet. If you need to get more than one thing across, or you have a string of ideas that pertain to one another, consider publishing a thread by replying to your original Tweet.
• Include a clear call-to-action (CTA). Drive your audience to read your blog, sign up for your newsletter, or follow your account in a CTA that brings the whole Tweet together.
• Assess whether or not emojis are right for you! Consider using emojis to add emotion or spice up your message. However, they may not be appropriate for all businesses or industries and can occasionally reduce engagement.
• Use hashtags! Adding one or two relevant hashtags increases the chances that people interested in that topic will find your business’ Tweets. You can even create a branded hashtag to use for specific campaigns or user-generated content!
• Use images, GIFs, and videos as much as possible. Tweets with a visual component receive around three times more engagement than plain text Tweets.
• When using images, make sure to avoid using heavy text elements.
• Keep videos to 15 seconds long, add captions, and optimize for mobile. More than 90% of Twitter users watch videos on handheld devices.

If you’re not sure what to Tweet, consider announcing product or service launches, asking questions, or running polls to get your followers engaged.

Additionally, Twitter is perfect for interacting with third-party content. Curate Tweets by retweeting relevant content like articles, customer feedback, positive mentions, and ideas aligned with your brand voice.

The great thing about social media is that most platforms have built-in analytics tools that you can use to measure your success. Regularly use the Twitter analytics tool to check for metrics like Retweets, Replies, and Likes to see what content resonates the most with your target audience and use those insights to drive your Twitter marketing strategy. Keep in mind that social media is an ever-changing playing field and what worked once may not work down the road, so you must keep analyzing and adapting.

Participate in Trending Conversations

Position your brand as an industry leader by inserting your business into trending topics. Third-party social listening tools, or Twitter’s native analytics tool, can help you identify influencers and trending events and present an opportunity to engage in their conversations. Take it another step further and identify which trends your competitors are participating in and find a way to get involved so that you can get your brand in front of their followers.

Have you ever created a Twitter List? Once you’ve started relationships with thought leaders and identified your competitors, compile them into a List. Lists act as a micro-feed, showing you content published from only the accounts you choose. It’s a great way to segment content based on topic, industry, or relevance while weeding out less critical content. Segmentation is excellent for research or specific goals, but you can miss a lot if you rely solely on Lists, so be sure to watch your general feed often.

Connect and Engage with Your Followers

Social media is more than just a platform to connect with friends, family, and like-minded individuals; it has become a platform for consumer research. Over half of social media users worldwide use social media to research products and brands, making an active and engaging social media presence more important for businesses than ever.

Make your Twitter followers feel valued by replying to their questions and concerns in a timely and personable manner. Extend this courtesy to positive feedback and mentions to show that you care about your customer’s thoughts and opinions. We recommend Retweeting, Quote tweeting, and replying as often as possible and within four hours of the original post.

The days of carefree social media are long gone. Almost every business and consumer out there is active on social media, and the content pool is endless. Following these best practices will help push your content through the clutter and ultimately to your target audience. If social media is not your strong suit and publishing to multiple platforms sounds overwhelming, Front Porch Solutions has you covered. Reach out to one of our experts today for all of your social media management needs!