Top Twitter Engagement Tips
to Keep Your Followers Engaged

With over 300 million active users and still counting, one shouldn’t doubt Twitter’s credibility as one of the most popular social media platforms to drive torrents of traffic, generate tons of sales ready leads, and build an engaged community around a brand. Studies reveal that approximately 72% of twitter users prefer to buy services from a business they follow on Twitter.

But here’s the deal:

With only 280 characters to get your tweets noticed, it could prove to be a daunting task to make your marketing efforts count. Remember, if you aren’t able to keep people engaged on Twitter, you are leaving money on the table. The true value of Twitter lies is in its engagement and typically engagement rate between 0.33% and 1% is considered good. But with just 6 seconds to grab attention for your tweets, instigating organic engagement on Twitter remains no mean feat.

In order to help you boost engagement, here we present to you six top tips that almost guarantee better engagement on Twitter.

1. Follow the Practice of Personalized Engagement

79% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands that offer personalized content. So it makes sense to use personalized tweets. You never know, but even a simple personalized response from you can make your customers connect with your brand on a much better level as your personalized tweets means a sign of appreciation and respect for them.

You can also go a step ahead and visit the timelines of your frequent followers. Look for tweets that are related to achieving different milestones in their personal lives such as purchasing a car, getting a promotion, having a new baby, getting married, etc. You can craft a personal message for those milestones and send to those followers separately without using any hashtags. (Try to stay away from making disingenuous or insidious comments as they can confuse your customers instead of feeling appreciated by the message.)

2. Use Relevant Hashtags

Promoting a hashtag campaign will not only help you spark a conversation about your brand, but will also help you rejuvenate the community of your followers. To initiate a hashtag campaign with your followers, start by deciding the goal of your campaign and make sure that it’s relevant to your customers. You can also start by researching with what your audience is following and then initiate a hashtag campaign they can identify themselves with.

Your hashtag conversations will help you make your brand relevant to your old, as well as new customers. One Indian brand that has been able to successfully and strategically use hashtags is Policybazaar. The company brilliantly uses hashtags related to its industry and business in order to reach out to new followers. Policybazaar’s Twitter page clearly illustrates how strategic use of hashtags can help you increase followers and increase engagement.

3. Retweet Your Customers

Every one of us loves to be acknowledged and appreciated, so don’t hesitate to retweet your customers’ tweet to show that you value what they’re saying or posting. However, make sure to choose only those tweets that align with the values and character of your brand.

Also, try to add a comment to your customers’ retweet as it will help you contribute something to the ongoing conversation. Retweeting mostly works in your favor as it helps your customers to relate to your brand and feel recognized and validated.

4. Run Contests

Everybody loves freebies. That’s why running a Twitter contest is said to be one of the best ways to encourage your customers and keep them engaged with your brand. For example, one of the newspaper rewards programs, MyMail, runs a contest for its followers by the name of #FridayFreebie. In this contest, people can get free puzzle books for following the brand and retweeting its tweets.

Here, it’s important to make sure that your audience can relate to the giveaways offered to them. Your contest theme should resonate with your followers. Also, try to keep a low barrier so that people find it easy to participate in the contest. Make sure to promote your contest on different social media platforms as all of the social mentions will further help you boost your brand awareness.

5. Tweet Links to Problem Solving Content

Providing your followers with content that will help them improve their lives is one of the best ways to grab their attention. For instance, Whole Foods is known to provide links to their followers on cooking tips. The supermarket brand regularly tweets healthy eating habits, seasonal recipes and cookbook recommendation for its followers.

Always try to post the links that will prove useful and relatable to your audience. For this, go through your follower’s profile and learn about their likes, dislikes and the factors that are currently influencing them. It will help you identify what issue your audience is facing on a collective basis and you can use it in your favour by creating content that might prove helpful to them. However, make sure to avoid using any selling tactics in your content as customers are intelligent enough to notice any such deception. You never know, but in some cases, the customers may even feel offended and decide to leave your brand.

Therefore, rather than selling, focus on guiding and educating your customers so that they can ultimately find the solution they were looking for. It will automatically build their trust in your brand and you’ll be able to gain the end result of customer retention and more sales. This will further strengthen your relationship with the customers by making them follow those links and will eventually help you unify your brand with their lifestyles.

6. Acknowledge and Revert To Your Customer’s Problems

There will always be times when your customers aren’t happy with your services and will demand your attention to get their problems resolved. In such scenarios, you can always use direct messages to offer your customers one-on-one assistance. Airline JetBlue believes in following this practice and offers individual assistance to its passengers whenever they tweet to the company for any kind of support.

One important thing to understand here is if you aren’t able to respond to your customers’ concerns/queries in a timely manner there is no point replying to them at all. Customers today are looking for an instant solution and your lack of your timely response can easily drive them away to other providers.