Struggling to increase engagement and exposure on Twitter?
You’ve spent hours creating your article and naturally want to get as much exposure as you can for your literary masterpiece.
Sharing it with your social network, specifically through Twitter, is probably something you’re doing already.
After all, Twitter is the information network so why not share it with your followers?
So you send your tweet, sit back, and wait.
And wait…
What happened? Why hasn’t anyone retweeted you?
According to a Sysomos study (involving the examination of 1.2 billion tweets over a two month period) you only have a short time span of 3 hours for your Tweet to be effective.
Source: Sysomos
In fact 92.4% of retweets happen in the first hour, which drops to 1.63% in the second hour, and down to 0.94% in the third hour.
If your tweet isn’t retweeted within the first hour, you can assume that it won’t be.
So how can you make your tweets stand out from the dozens of tweets being sent each second so that followers read, reply and/or retweet it?
Here are some tips to help you increase engagement with your community while continue to gain exposure for your article.
Twitter Strategy 1: Make your tweets thought provoking, informative and newsworthy
As mentioned earlier Twitter is the information network with well over a thousand tweets being sent every minute. For your tweet to have any chance of being shared, it has to be informative, newsworthy and relevant to your audience.
Dull, boring and irrelevant – just won’t cut it. Tweeting ‘Here’s my latest article’ is hardly going to spark interest and engagement.
Make it interesting and compelling so that readers not only click through to your article, but also feel inspired to share it with their followers.
Twitter Strategy 2: Repurpose Your Tweets
Not all of your followers are going to see your tweet when you initially send it. Retweeting your article at different times throughout the day (or across several days/months) is another way to reach a fresh audience.
Guy Kawasaki schedules the same tweet 4 times, 8 hours apart in order to capture more views from his followers who are located across different time zones. Other Twitter gurus use this strategy as well, with the same tweet spread over several weeks or months.
I’ve tried this strategy myself, with great success. Every so often I’ll tweet about one of my older articles, which allows me to share it with my most recent followers who haven’t had the opportunity to read it yet.
The snapshot below shows my article: Are you developing (or destroying) your online reputation and relationships, which I’ve tweeted every-so-often over several months. Each time it generated new views and retweets.
A word of caution; don’t be tempted to schedule your tweets too close together. You don’t want to turn off your followers by being repetitive.
I’ve only just learned about another tool – Buffer, which claims that users saw a 200% increase in clickthroughs to their links, after two weeks of ‘buffering’ their tweets.
Twitter Strategy 3: Ask a question and encourage opinions
Asking for opinions is a great way to engage with your followers.
I often do this when I’m doing some research for an article and want to find out what other people are doing. It’s also a great way to generate interest in your upcoming article.
Twitter Strategy 4: Add a call to action
Social Media Scientist – Dan Zarella discovered some interesting results and writes about it in his article 5 scientifically proven ways to get more retweets.
According to Dan’s findings, the phrase:
- Please ReTweet generated 51% retweets
- Please RT generated 39% retweets
- And neither call to actions still resulted in a 12% of people retweeting
Use this call to action sparingly though as asking people to retweet each of your articles (especially if you update your blog weekly) could become repetitive and turn off some of your followers.
Twitter Strategy 5: Shorten your tweets to 120-130 characters
Shorten the length of your tweets to make it easier for your followers to retweet it.
If people are required to abbreviate and rewrite your tweet so that they can fit in their twitter handles, they probably won’t bother. And, it may just lose your brand voice if they make drastic changes to fit it into 140 characters.
Twitter Strategy 6: Use different hashtags
A great way to reach an audience that may not be following you directly is by using hashtags. [This # symbol].
By placing a hashtag in front of a keyword will allow your tweet to be found when people are searching for that specific keyword.
Some of my favorite keywords that are relevant to my target market is #smallbusiness, #smallbiz, #branding, so I will regularly include one (or more) of those keywords in my tweet.
[Source: TweetReachTo find out which hashtags (keywords) are most popular, use these two resources:
So there are six ways you can leverage Twitter to gain exposure for your article.
Remember though, one of the best ways to get your tweets to capture the attention of your audience so they feel compelled to share it with their community, is to make it interesting, inspiring and relevant.
What about you? Do you retweet your tweets? How often? What results have you seen?
Stay inspired!
Great info! Thank you! 🙂
Thanks Scarlett – glad you found the article helpful. I love Twitter and find this is one of the most successful in lead generation.
Excellent article on maximizing our Twitter experience and marketing! Thanks for sharing Annemarie! …Hughie
My pleasure Hughie – here’s to increasing your engagement and exposure on Twitter!
This sure is an informative and educational post Annemarie!
Though I have been on Twitter for sometime now, but there are still so many new things I keep learning daily, and your post just adds to the list.
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Glad you found it informative Harleena. There are so many new tools popping up that can help us leverage Twitter. It’s almost a full time job keeping up with it!!
Brilliant article on marketing and on maximizing our Twitter experience! Thank you so much for sharing.
Thanks Anastasiya – hope you’re able to use some of the strategies in your marketing.
I enjoyed your tips and am happy to say I am doing most of them of them, using Market Me Suite alot – very easy to schedule tweets, etc. The one thing I haven’t done is “ask” to be retweeted. I’ll have to try that one.
Wonderful Laurie = yes, I’ve heard that Market Me Suite is a great tool! I’ve tried the ‘ask’ to for retweets a few times myself and this has worked well for me too.
Amazing information! Thanks for sharing…this is sure to increase traffic and exposure!
You’re so welcome Denny – glad you found the article helpful!
Excellent article. Thank you.
Thanks Carol – glad you enjoyed it.
These are all great pointers Annemarie! I’ve been playing around with rescheduling my old posts… but haven’t figured out the right timing… this posts helps. Thanks!
Glad you found the article helpful Knikkolette!
Your second and third points are really awesome.
I have actually tried to schedule my tweets in different times when i was having about 500 followers and to be honest I felt so lazy to do so as i wasn’t getting any result.
You just remembered me about it and i will start doing it again.
Thanks a lot for the port 😀 really helpful tips.
Glad you found them helpful Faissal; personally, scheduling my Tweets has been a fantastic way to connect and share information with people not in my time zone. Thanks for stopping by!
Fantastic article, as always!
The only thing I might add is the suggestion to optimize your tweet for re-tweeting. For instance, if you put the link right at the end, it will sometimes get lost in the re-tweet, which detracts from your tweet’s value. Putting a short question/CTA at the beginning, followed by the URL, followed by the rest of the text and/or hashtags, has allowed me to ensure that URLs are retained in retweeting.
Wonderful suggestion Jessica – thank you! Absolutely – using hashtags/CTAs and a short question are great ways to optimize your tweet.
That was really gold mine article. Strategics in improving twitter followers and gain a handsome amount of traffic have been an indispensable one for social media marketing. Got a handful of tips and learning here. Now its time for applied learning.
Hi Jeane, glad you found the article helpful. And, I’m glad to hear you’re going to be putting these to action!! Twitter certainly is a great way to build your network and your business!
Hi Annemarie –
I appreciate your twitter tips, however I’m all of a sudden having a hard time even obtaining views from my scheduled tweets. I have them going out every few minutes on multiple twitters. You’d think T.CO would be the #1 referrer in my analytics however I’m hardly receiving any traffic from twitter at all. Do you think its possible to tweet too much?
Thanks Again, Feel free to connect with me and God bless,
Curt
Hi Curt, I’ve noticed a significant drop in my T.CO figures as well, so there must be something going there. Regarding your question ‘is it possible to tweet too much?’ I think that very much depends on your audience, what you are sending, and how often you spend time engaging, sharing other people’s information, and responding to other people’s comments etc. If you are only tweeting out promotional material then yes, I believe that you can tweet too much if you are not balancing your tweets with helpful, inspiring and resources information. And, of course engaging with your followers, which is what social media is all about. In regards to the people who are following you – if your followers are relatively new to Twitter and therefore not following many people, you risk the chance of them unfollowing you because you end up in their feed and only you, because all of their other followers never have the opportunity to be seen because you’re information is constantly going out. These are a few things you’ll need to consider. For me personally, I send out a tweet between 35 to 55 minutes. That seems to work well for me. Hope that helps!
Thanks Annemarie,
Great information. I’ll be shortening my tweets from now on for retweetability
Thanks for stopping by Nick. Great strategy – after all, getting your tweets, retweeted will certainly increase your exposure!
Superb article on maximizing the Twitter experience and advertising! Thanks for sharing Annemarie!
I’m not a Twitter user – at least not for business – but through discussions with friends and family who use it for business purposes I can certainly see that you’ve presented some fantastic strategies here, Anne Marie.
The big thing that I’ve noticed – especially with one of closest friends who does a lot of Twitter marketing – is how shy people can be when it comes to including a call to action. I suppose we’ve all been raised not to ‘annoy’ people (someone didn’t send that memo to telemarketers, unfortunately,) so I wonder if that has something to do with people being a little ‘gun shy’ when asking for a RT.
I also liked that you made a point to mention not to ask for a RT with each of your posts. I can imagine that would get very annoying, very quickly a lead to a lot of spur-of-the moment unfollows.
I’ll be emailing this link across to him, Anne Marie. Wonderful work as always.
Wonderful insight, AnneMarie. For those of us coming across to Twitter from being full-time Facebook nerds, remembering to shorten our tweets so they can be shared is an important part of the process. Many people wouldn’t think twice about the length of tweets effecting their RT value!