Increase your Twitter brand awareness in 140 characters or less

Jade Rattan 7 years ago

Picture the scene…it's lunchtime, on a rainy Wednesday. The thought of venturing out of the comfort of the office on your lunch hour is not appealing, so you open up your browser and search for some light entertainment to keep you busy while you pick at your sandwiches.

But where do you go?

Chances are, your first stop on the internet is a social media sƒite – and while Facebook might be your thing there’s no denying that Twitter is the King of Content Sharing. More and more people are accessing articles, images, videos and who knows what else via the 140 character musings of their favourite brands and celebrities. With huge news stories like the recent shooting of Michael Brown now being shared by witnesses in real time, Twitter is increasingly becoming the place to go for breaking news too.

With Twitter’s popularity continuing to explode, it’s crucial for businesses to take advantage of the platform to increase brand awareness and build customer relationships. While your tweets are unlikely to reach the lofty heights of Ellen or even Obama, there are certain things you can do to help increase your posts’ popularity with your followers.

Get Organised

Firstly, get organised. The key to a strong Twitter presence is consistency, and the best way to achieve this is by spending some time creating a content calendar. This can be broken down by platform so you can keep track of what’s being posted where and when. It’s easy enough to create a content calendar template in Excel, but there are plenty of ready-made templates available online.This one was created right here in Zazzle HQ, and will give you a good idea of what to include and how to lay it all out.Spending a couple of hours a month on a content calendar may seem an insurmountable task to start with – after all, how are you supposed to know what people will be talking about in three weeks? – but in the long run it will save you a lot of time and stress. Finding five or six different things to tweet about can be difficult if it’s a slow news day. Having a few tweets already drafted will make life a lot easier for you, and will ensure that your Twitter presence remains consistent.

Make it shareable

The shareability of your content is crucial and needs to be kept in mind when drafting tweets. If the aim of the game is to increase brand awareness then you need to be retweeted as much as possible, and nobody is going to share a ‘how are you this morning?’ tweet because they could write that themselves.In order to generate retweets you need to be posting content that is interesting, informative or funny – if you can make it all three, that’s even better. Crucially though, your content needs to be relevant. Your audience clicked the follow button because they believe you can offer them something that is of interest to them – if you’re a digital agency then chances are your audience want you to update them on digital innovation. They’re not following you because they want you to share pictures of cute fluffy animals or political commentary – they can get that elsewhere. There is often a temptation to get involved in big conversations, but unless these are relevant to your brand it’s probably best to steer clear.Instead, you should be tapping in to what your audience wants to hear…tools such as Radian6, Followerwonk, and SocialBro can provide you with invaluable data on what your audience is talking about – harness this data, and make it your best friend. If you can tap into your followers’ interests and passions then you’re one step closer to producing content they actually want to share.

Make it timely

This is a double-edged sword, and many people underestimate the importance of timeliness on Twitter – or any social platform, for that matter.Firstly, you need to ensure that you’re making the most of any relevant chatter that is already taking place. Your audience are more likely to engage if you’re commenting on something that is happening right this very second, so keep an eye on trending topics and any breaking news stories that are relevant to your brand. I mentioned previously that news is now breaking on Twitter – this means that conversations move on quickly and what’s trending now might not be in a couple of hours. Don’t wait to get involved in the conversation, as chances are you’ll end up missing it.So what is the other edge of this sword that I speak of?As well as ensuring your content is timely in terms of what’s happening in the rest of the world, you also need to think about the best time to publish your tweets. Now that Twitter has opened up its analytics tools to everyone it’s never been easier to keep track of when your audience is online. Twitter analytics pulls data from the last 28 days and can show you at a glance which days your tweets generated more engagement. It’s easy to then structure your content calendar around this information, insuring that your most compelling content is posted on the day that most people are looking at your tweets.It’s possible to go even deeper than this using some of the tools I mentioned above. Radian6 and SocialBro (as well as plenty of others out there) can give you an hour-by-hour breakdown showing when your audience are online and when your interactions took place. You can then use this data to inform your strategy – if more people are talking about digital at 3pm on a Tuesday than at any other time, then this is when you need to be publishing your stand out content. This Econsultancy article is a great source of information on how you can use Twitter analytics to find the optimum time to post.

Give them more

A report in 2013 showed that link clicks account for more than 92% of all engagement on Twitter. Not only that, but tweets with links are retweeted 86% more than those without – so not only are they taking people where you want them to go, they’re also helping to raise awareness of your brand. Beware though – your engagement will drop faster than a lead balloon if your link doesn’t work!It’s not just links that help drive engagement. There have been numerous reports (including the one I mention above) that show that tweets including photos generate up to double the engagement than those without. This number drops slightly for tweets that link to videos or include quotes, but these are still retweeted more than those comprised solely of text.So, what do all these lovely statistics tell us? Well firstly, they tell us that people are a teeny tiny bit lazy. They don’t want to go to the trouble of copying and pasting your link into their browser, and as Twitter is becoming more and more mobile I can’t say I blame them.Secondly, these stats tell us that audiences want to share something of value with their followers. While a humorous tweet might get people smiling, an amusing image or a thought-provoking article will get people clicking – and that’s what it’s all about.

Use hashtags – but not too many

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that tweets with hashtags generate more engagement than those without, but did you know that too many hashtags is as bad as none? Engagement rates drop by around 17% for tweets that have three or more hashtags, proving that just because you can hashtag anything it doesn’t mean you should.If you’re ‘creating’ your own hashtag then make sure you keep it as short as possible, otherwise you’ll have eaten up all your characters without having said anything of value. If you’re commenting on a trending issue then check to see what hashtags everyone else is using first. Most events or products will have a designated hashtag that’s being used by the company or organiser, so if you want to comment on this then make sure you seek this out and use it – this will ensure your voice is heard by those already involved in the conversation. Crucially, ensure your hashtag is spelled correctly - #googelpidgen is no good to anyone if you’re talking about Google’s new algorithm.

Check, double check and triple check

This leads me neatly to my next point – Check your spelling. Check your grammar. Check your facts. Get any of these wrong, and you risk generating engagement for all the wrong reasons. One example that springs to mind is a famous fitness brand that asked its audience what their ‘Wednesday Workout’ was going to be…on Thursday morning. It was swiftly deleted, but not before a few hundred people had got in touch to highlight the failings of their social media manager.Aside from spellcheck (and we all know how unreliable that can be!) there is no magic tool to help you with this one. It simply comes down to due diligence on your part. Make sure you’re proofreading all your tweets at least twice, and if you’re not 100% of something have someone else check too. Only once you’ve done this should you hit ‘tweet’.

Keep an eye on the competition

Mark Twain once said that ‘all ideas are second hand’, and he wasn’t wrong. Unless your business specialises in something incredibly niche then you do have competitors, and while intellectual theft or copyright infringement isn’t what we’re aiming for there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from what the competition did well – and learning from what they did badly!The best way to approach this on a day-to-day basis is to create a private list of all your competitors and check in on what they’re doing each day. There are also tools out there that will allow you to delve deeper should you need to - Social Crawlytics and Shared Count are two tools that can help track competitor activity, and my old favourite Radian6 has tons of tools that can compare how different brands are doing across social platforms.

Keep it brief

This is obviously more difficult than it sounds, because 140 characters is pretty brief already. Unfortunately though, research by TrackSocial shows us that tweets between 71 and 100 characters generate the most engagement, so this is really what we should all be aiming for.
length-of-tweet

Keep doing what works…and ditch the things that don’t

With so many powerful tools now available there’s really no excuse for not knowing what content performs best on your channels. Twitter’s analytics tools can show you at a glance which tweets are generating the most engagement, but it’s also possible to export this data to get a more in-depth analysis.By exporting the data to an excel document you can categorize your tweets in order to see which type of tweet does better overall. The example below is taken from @ZazzleMedia’s analytics. After exporting the data to excel we broke the tweets down by category – internal posts (for example blog posts), external posts/news (where we are linking to an article on a site that is not affiliated with Zazzle Media), Zazzle news and events, and Interactions.

twitter-cat

Once you’ve categorised your tweets, you can calculate the average engagement rate for each category. This will give you an idea of what content is working well on Twitter, and what content you should consider scaling back on.Based on this data, we can see that the most successful tweets from @ZazzleMedia have been interactions, with an engagement rate of 4.16%.

This, to some extent, is to be expected due to the nature of the tweet, but it also tells us that communicating with other users on Twitter is an effective way to increase engagement. Company news and events came second, with an average engagement rate of just under 2.78%. Engagement for internal posts rests at 1.42% with external posts trailing behind at 0.9%.

Once you have this data in front of you, it becomes much easier to make an informed decision about what content to really push, and what you should scale back on. By establishing that interaction with other users can help boost engagement, we can begin to implement a plan that will have us spending more time engaging with industry leaders as opposed to simply posting their articles on our feed.

This will help us to spark conversation with other thought leaders and boost engagement, but will also allow us to share our thoughts on recent digital news and updates.Twitter Analytics is not the only tool available to help with this kind of analysis - in the past I’ve used Adobe Social, Hootsuite, Meltwater, Tweetdeck, Bit.Ly, BuzzSumo and plenty more besides. Each have their own merits and drawbacks, but between them it’s possible to draw up a comprehensive picture of what works well for your brand and where you should be focusing your efforts.

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