How to Build your Twitter Followers (Part 2)

Image credit: crazyegg.com

In continuation of my earlier post on How to Build Your Twitter Followers (Part 1), here is the Part 2 of the series.

So now (hopefully), you have a nascent but successful Twitter presence. You’ve found your editorial voice [content], you’ve sorted your engagement, and have worked out rewards and RoI. So now, what more to becoming a Twitter super-brand?

Content

You will have realized by now that content is a gateway drug – you can never have enough of it. Knowing & accepting this, first, optimize your content efforts by designing a content calendar. 

1. Invest time in the editorial calendar – this will tell you which are your content-heavy months and which are relatively lighter. That will help you plan your resources accordingly. What should your editorial content be? Depends. In case you are a listed company, you will have a huge repository of content – company announcements, senior leadership news, partnerships, major deals, new launches. In case you are a start-up, well, then you too will have a content repository – market entry in new cities, incorporation, acquisition, new funding partner coming on board and the like. Though it will not be possible to plan all your content in advance, but it will act as a navigational guide to remove uncertainty. It would usually be a 60/40 ratio. 60% of your content can be planned in advance and 40% would be current & unplanned.

2. Invest in good visuals: Tweets with images get 313% more engagement than tweets without an image, according to a 2015 post from Twitter. You can use single images, animated GIFs, graphics [for promotions], charts, illustrations. In short, make it a visual compelling item on the web – eyeballs will come.

3. Hashtags: Very important - and very easy to overdo. #Before #you #hashtag #everything, read this article here. Few relevant hashtags a post can far outweigh the benefits of an excessively hashtagged monstrosity.

4. Be active: It’s not enough to post your own content – engage with content of other influencers, customers, brands. You must retweet good customer testimonials, industry news that impacts you, associations that you have partnered with.

5. Track trends: In case there is already a topic trending on the internet which is relevant to your industry, you can benefit from offering a content snippet on that. It can be a humorous take, an insightful opinion, a senior leadership interview.

6. Automation: You may want to use automation to free up your strategy time. Check out tools that automate your tweets. Be careful though, the internet is replete with ill-timed tweets and its repercussions.

7. Recycling content: Creating a good genuine piece of content takes time, and effort. You can use the same content to spin off multiple content ideas. For example, if you write a blog “How to improve your lead generation”, you can tweet different core  ideas from the same article with different visuals for over 3 [or more] days, thereby driving more traffic to your blog.

Engagement

1. Frequency: Your tweet frequency depends on the industry & company you are in, the kind of products that you have and your marketing objectives and resources. But that does not mean, an erratic tweet once a week is healthy. You need to have regular engagement or else not have any account at all. The content calendar will help you plan your tweet frequency accordingly.

2. Follow relevant accounts in your business vertical: You may want to check out tools like Followerwonk, ManageFlitter, and Audiense or find out influencer accounts yourself. Be mindful of the followers / following ratio of the influencers you follow.

3. In case you are sharing a third party content, don’t just retweet. Share an insight or a snippet to go along with it, and always acknowledge the author.

Rewards / RoI

What your rewards / RoI are depends on what your Twitter engagement objectives are. Are your objectives to increase visibility? Or digital PR? Whatever your objectives, your rewards / RoI matrix should be mapped to that.

For example, if you want to enhance visibility, then you may want to reward users for maximum interaction [downloads of e-books / newsletter] on your website.
If you want to increase seasonal promotions, then  you may want to start a digital discount campaign through Twitter.

Keep tweeting & keep reading!