5 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Following
When it comes to Twitter engagement, you probably want more of it—who doesn’t? To be honest, everyone wants more—more likes, replies, retweets, followers, and mentions. Twitter is a channel that moves incredibly fast and the shelf life of a Tweet is low, so engagement can vary greatly. Here are a few strategies to improve your rates, wherever they may currently be.
1. Focus on Good Content
Whether you utilize pictures, graphics, videos, memes, or something else, if you want engagement on Twitter, your content has to be good. This can be a mix of your own content as well as relevant sourced content. Just make sure to tag or quote people properly so sourced content doesn’t appear stolen.
When utilizing your own content, it’s not always about creating brand new stuff. Instead, it’s repurposing things you already have. If you’ve written a blog, you can likely repurpose this one single article a few times on Twitter. For example, one week you can use a quote that has been turned into a graphic using Canva or another design tool. Down the road you can highlight a key takeaway from the article. Another week you can share a link to the entire post and utilize the post’s featured image.
Here are a few other ideas that work as good content for Twitter:
Share images of you or your team speaking or working with clients.
Utilize content or graphics from books or other articles you’ve published.
Share a popular tool from a session you’ve recently presented.
Record a quick video of a tip or an idea your audience would value.
2. Ask for Engagement
One way to get more engagement is to ask. When you tweet, frame a question or ask followers to share strategies that have worked for them on a similar topic.
Engagement doesn’t occur from your posts alone. You can model this when engaging with other accounts as well. If you read an interesting article shared by a publication or thought leader, reply with feedback and ask a follow up question. Or when you engage with a school or district leader on one of their posts about something that happened within their school or district, celebrate something they shared or ask them to elaborate on best practices. Make sure to start by reading their post and clicking their linked content when needed to ensure your replies comes across authentically.
Utilizing polls is a great way to increase engagement as well, and a nice way to generate content after the poll is completed. For example, if you asked your audience to share what type of professional development they preferred, and you provided options such as in person, virtual, online, or events, you could later use the results in another post.
3. Be Active
Don’t expect high engagement if you aren’t active on Twitter yourself. Follow relevant accounts, engage with your ideal customer base, retweet relevant content, and like and reply to tweets. Take time to engage authentically by really reading conversations and clicking on relevant links to dig deeper.
Good accounts to follow include:
Current and former clients, which can be people as well as a district or school
Education thought leaders
Education publications
Education companies and nonprofit associations
Competition and other speakers or authors
Potential or prospective clients
Education influencers
This list is a good place to start to get some ideas on relevant education accounts to engage with on Twitter.
4. Use Hashtags
Utilize popular education hashtags to make sure your content is being found. While hashtags can change regularly, you can search for popular lists such as this one. Also, pay attention to hashtags that people or thought leaders in your network use to determine which ones you can try.
5. Be Consistent
When it comes to Twitter, consistency is key. While you don’t have to be active every single day, leaving for weeks at a time can be harmful. Creating a schedule of posts and utilizing scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social can help.
Enjoy this complimentary social media content calendar to help you get started!
Another tip to aid with consistency is to schedule time blocks or set calendar reminders a few times a day so you get in the habit of being active. Use this time not only to engage with your audience, but also to see what your competition is doing well.
The more planning you do, the easier it is to create a content strategy. Try to schedule your content posts out so you can fill gaps and determine when and how you will create new resources to use in Twitter.
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