With over 300 million global users and 100 million daily active users, Twitter has evolved to be the major driving force in online marketing. The platform is a major slice of social marketing mysteries for most businesses. Building a Twitter presence can be compared to when you are growing a garden. It takes planning, developing strategies and it is time consuming. Similarly, It takes time and actionable strategies and growth hacks to increase twitter engagements and followers organically.
Smallbiztrends defined growth hacking as a marketing technique used in gaining greater exposure, using traditional and analytical skills to acquire and engage new users.
If you are looking to build your presence and gain wider exposure, here are 10 twitter growth hacks to increase engagement and followers.
#1. Analyze your tweets using Twitter analytics tools
With Twitter analytics tools, it’s easier to understand your target audience, best engaging tweets, less performing tweets, and how you can boost engagement and increase followers. The analysis will help you create a solid Twitter strategy that will help you increase engagement and followers.
Twitter is extensively changing social media marketing, you need to know the right tools to use to ensure the best ways to grow your followers and increase engagements. The best Twitter analytics tools include Twitter Analytics, BuzzSumo, Spruce, Hootsuite, and Riffle.
#2. Create and share relevant content
Create interesting and relevant content to tweet daily. Posting fresh and unique content on Twitter is the best way to get retweeted, increase and engage followers. In addition to creating your own content, you can also curate and tweet relevant content that your followers will like and retweet. This will help increase your credibility in your niche. The best content curation tools are Prismatic, Fever and Feedly.
#3. Create captivating images to go with your Tweet
Create captivating images and be a visual tweeter. A Twitter stats report from Hubspot shows that the use of images result in 18% more click through, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets. According to Jeff Bullas, “Increased percentage for engagement for a tweet with an image over a tweet without an image is a staggering 581%. Creative designs including GIFS also perform very well. According to Bufferapp blog, “Tweets with image links get 2x the engagement rate of those without”. This means that it is better to focus on creating captivating images to increase engagements on Twitter.
#4. Use relevant hashtags
Hashtags, sometimes determine how far your tweets can reach. When you use relevant hashtags, your tweets can reach your target audience and get your more Twitter followers. Tweets with hashtags get 2x more engagement. As Bufferapp report shows that tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags. Therefore, it is advisable not to overuse hashtags.
#5. Know the best time to tweet
Most people do not know the best time to tweet. According to Bufferapp blog, “Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends”. Twitter clickthrough rate study by Dan Zarella shows that weekends and afternoons show the highest twitter CTRS. You can schedule your Twitter posts on weekends if you won’t be available. Bufferapp is one of the best tools for scheduling twitter posts. When you publish a tweet when most of your target audience are not available, it will be difficult to engage them.
#6. Retweet your tweets
Recently, Twitter announced that users can now easily retweet or quote themselves. With this new feature, users can retweet their old tweets and favorites to a bigger audience, thereby increasing engagements. According to BTFR’s blog, if a tweet gets a lot of retweets can get your tweet indexed by Google, allowing it to show up in search results. They also point out that users are notified of retweets, which gives you a power of reminder. Basically, you need to make a list of each follower who retweets you. These are people who like your content and they probably are connected with others who will like your content. These are the people you need to carefully follow, retweet, and mention as often as you can without coming across as a stalker.
#7. Engage your audience with humor
Share humor messages on Twitter and use them to engage your followers and customers. Creating humor tweets can also attract more followers. Almost half of the 30,000 respondents agreed that humorous ads resonate most, according to the Nielsen Global Survey of Trust in Advertising. Several brands like R/GA and Old Spice are engaging their followers with humor tweets. Humor tweets holds attention, elicit a positive response and are always memorable. When you publish humor messages on twitter, new audience would want to follow you for more.
#8. Follow and reach out to Twitter influencers
Twitter influencer marketing is popular; it is about getting celebrity or people who have a large number of followers and great reputation to tell your story to their audience. According to Launchmetrics, “76% of marketers consider influencer engagement effective in garnering customer loyalty”.
The role of Twitter influencers is essential in growing followers and increase customer retention. According to Buzzoole Blog, “Influencers are the secret to get followers, the more and more target ones”.
Twitter influencer marketing also plays a vital role in increasing brand engagement. “93% of marketing professionals are getting results in improving visibility through influencer engagement strategies”, Launchmetrics reported. Hence, if you want to increase your followers, reach out to Twitter influencers, retweet their tweets and follow them.
#9. Make use of ‘click to tweets’ on your website or within your articles
Click to Tweet makes it easy for your audience to share your content by creating fast tweet. An advantage of this feature is that it allows users to share your content instantly. If your website is developed with WordPress, you can download click-to-tweet plugin and insert it in your posts. Alternatively, you can generate a link from Click to tweet website and insert it in your post.
#10. Leverage Twitter Promoted Ads
With Twitter Promoted Ads, you can reach a wider audience, get more valuable followers and grow your network. Pay to promote your account or tweet to increase engagement and get more leads. Launch an advertising campaign on Twitter to reach your target audience.
Launch a campaign!? What time is it?!
It is time to growth hack! Getting more followers and increasing engagement on Twitter is not complicated. Analyse and scale your Twitter efforts, communicate effectively with your audience, and you will get actionable results.
Read more: Twitter Engagement and the Empty Promise