How To Use Twitter To Increase Your Reach and Engagement

For those of you who have been on Twitter should know how hard it is to get following and make impact on it. And Twitter being one of the major players on social media, you can’t miss out on the engagement on the platform with over 320 million active users. According to Statista, the amount of monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2017, the micro blogging service has increased to 330 million monthly active users.

Engagements on Twitter are basically defined by the total number of times users interactwith Tweets. To know that your Twitter account is properly engaged, you will be able to receive a couple of connections; people will mention you, favorite your tweet, and definitely follow you.

Twitter engagement is a crucial metric to evaluate for your business because you will have more chances to:

• Get feedback on products or services
• Easily sell your product or service
• Build brand loyalists
• Understand your audience
• Become an influencer in the market

You can measure Twitter engagements using Twitter analytics; Twitter’s analytics take things to a more advanced level.

With Twitter analytics, you can see impression numbers — i.e., how many times your tweet showed up in people’s feeds. You can get even more detail with breakdowns of when and where each of these impressions happened. Same goes for click stats and engagement metrics (Likes, retweets, etc.). Twitter analytics tells you where on the tweet and where on the network that someone clicked or engaged with your tweet.

Twitter analytics is open to everyone. If you tweet — whether as a company, brand, or individual — you can get full Twitter analytics on your tweets and followers.

• Click on your profile photo in the upper-left corner of your Twitter page and select “Analytics”.
• Once you access Twitter analytics for the first time, Twitter will start to pull impression and engagement data for tweets
• On the homepage of your Twitter analytics, you’ll get a 28-day summary of your Twitter account and a summary of each of the previous months.

When you use Twitter analytics tools, you’re able to determine your Twitter accounts engagements anytime someone clicks on the tweet.

Engagement on Twitter can also help to foster a relationship between you and other industry peers and experts. If you share their content, they might repay you at some point by linking to you or even sharing some of yours. For more information about this, you can visit expert websites like SandCrestSEO or Unmetric.

Let us look at how you can use Twitter to increase your reach and engagements.

Optimize your tweeting schedule;

Tweet during day time hours and during weekends.

• According to Buffer social statics, the early morning hours appear to be the time in which tweets receive the most clicks, on average.
• Evenings and late at night are the times when your tweets receive the most favorites and retweets, on average.
• In some cases, times with the highest amount of average engagement are almost inversely related to the most popular times to tweet.
• The most popular time to tweet and the best times to tweet for engagement differ across time zones, so it’s still important to experiment and find the times when your audience is most engaged.

At the same time, weekends are not the time to take a break from Twitter. If you want engagement, schedule tweets for Saturday and Sunday. According to social media experts, engagement is 17% higher on the weekends than it is on weekdays.

Know your audience;

In order to interact with your Twitter followers and to drive your tweets home with the right people, you have to target your audience. Here is how you can find your target audience:

1. Finding out who your most engaged users are on Twitter. This means finding out who mentions your brand handle the most, and responds to the owned content you pump out from your brand handle most frequently.
2. Build out your social personas, i.e., identifying your target-audience(s). You need to evaluate who is expanding your brand reach on channels outside of Twitter, like Instagram and Facebook.
3. Search for your top hashtags. Find the hashtags that are most often used with your own hashtag or brand handle. After that, search those hashtags on Twitter to source ideas for your content calendar and to better understand who your target audience is and what they care about.
4. Find your audience’s time zones. To understand your target audience best, publish content on schedule that will hit them at the right times. You also have to understand when your audience is active on Twitter.
5. Find Out Who Follows Your Competitors. Running analysis on who follows your competitors has a lot benefits: It helps you understand how/if your competitors’ audiences overlap with your own. It also helps you identify the Twitter users you need to target and steal away from your competitors.
6. Use hashtags; a hash tag on Twitter was created to allow people easily follow topics they are interested in. People use the(#)hashtag symbol before a relevant keyword or phrase in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter search. Clicking or tapping on a hash-tagged word in any message shows you other Tweets that include that hashtag. Hashtags can be included anywhere in a Tweet. They double your engagements’ rate and create a higher visibility on Twitter.
7. Share images; a picture helps you convey a richer message in the space of 140 characters. Research indicates tweets with photos from verified accounts indicate a 35% boost in the retweets on an average. You can now share multiple photos in one Tweet, which lets your followers get the big picture in one place. You can include up to four pictures, which will be displayed as a preview collage in your followers’ timelines. They can expand to see each photo individually. The multiple photos will also be displayed if your Tweet gets retweeted or embedded on another site.
8. Include links; Twitter interactions happen when readers click on links. All links (URLs) posted in Tweets are shortened.

How to post link in a tweet?

• Type or paste the URL into the Tweet box on Twitter.com.
• A URL of any length will be altered to 23 characters, even if the link itself is less than 23 characters long. Your character count will reflect this.
• Click the Tweet button to post your Tweet and link.

9. Add call to actions; using a call to action in your tweets is essential. CTAs can direct your audience to a specific call you want them to take in. it could be retweeting or sharing your message with their audience, click over your website or download some product. Encouraging your audience to share your content will earn you more exposure and reach, while requiring very little effort on their part. However, Twitter’s 140-character limit means that your CTAs have to be extra precise and direct.

Twitter is a great platform you can use to increase your engagements and grow your audience.

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This is an article by Kenneth Kakande. Writing by day and reading by night, Kenneth is an enthusiastic freelance writer that auspiciously covers topics to do with Social Media, Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Hosting and Design among many others. His passion for technology inspires him to share knowledge with friends.