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
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.
As I was putting together this article I wanted to see what other people were doing to leverage and repurpose their material on Twitter. So I asked my followers.
As you can see, I received some interesting responses.
I even asked my Facebook friends, who added their thoughts to the conversation as well.
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
Source: Dan Zarella
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: TweetReach
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? I’d love to hear from you in the comment box below.
