8/7/2014 10 Twitter Tactics to Increase Your Engagement | Social Media Examiner

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10 Twitter Tactics to IncreaseYour EngagementBy Neil Patel

Published August 7, 2014

Do your tweets get noticed?

Are you getting enough engagement on

Twitter?

Twitter’s true value is in its engagement.

Unless people are engaging with you on

Twitter, you’re wasting your time.

In this article I’ll share 10 tweeting techniques that lead to better engagement.

#1: Keep Tweets Under 110 Characters

Twitter’s legendary character restriction seems short, but if you’re maxing out your

character count, your tweets are too long.

Shorter tweets with around 110 characters get 17% higher engagement, and

there’s a reason for that. When you leave room in a tweet, it makes it easier for people

to retweet you and add their own commentary.

Learn 10 tips for increasing engagement on Tw itter.

Jerry Low says:

If you are using all 140 characters in your tweet, your followers will need to edit your

tweets before they can add in theirs and retweet. And, that’s not cool. People are lazy.

Tweets that need extensive editing work simply get fewer retweets. Ideally, you should

limit your tweets to between 80–110 characters.

#2: Tweet During Daytime Hours

The Twittersphere is active during the 11-12 hours of daytime in your audience’s time

zone. Between 8am and 7pm, your tweets will have 30% higher interaction. (To find

out exactly when your audience is most active , you can use the free tool from

Tweriod.)

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Be mindful of w here your audience lives. Image: Shutterstock.

That means you must keep your target audience in mind and adjust your timing

as needed. If your company’s social media person is in Bangalore catering to a West

Coast USA audience, she will need to adjust or schedule her tweets accordingly.

#3: Tweet on Saturday and Sunday

Weekends are not the time to take a break from Twitter. If you want engagement,

schedule tweets for Saturday and Sunday. According to the data, engagement is 17%

higher on the weekends than it is on weekdays.

Salesforce’s research determined that there is an inverse relationship between brands

that tweet on the weekend and the engagement rates on the weekend.

Weekends aren’t the time to take a Tw itter

break. Image Shutterstock.

But doesn’t this data conflict with the point above, regarding tweeting during working

hours? Not exactly. As the data crunchers observed, the daytime tweet engagement is

high even during weekends. Salesforce reported,

When brands tweet during “busy hours” (8am–7pm), they receive 30% higher

engagement than tweets that fall during “non-busy hours” (8pm–7am). This even

includes tweets published on Saturday and Sunday.

#4: Share Images

Twitter’s rich Tweets give you higher levels of engagement for images and videos

(e.g., Vine videos). You can get a 150% increase in retweets just by including

images.

Buffer conducted an A/B test of tweets with pictures (A) and tweets without pictures

(B). In each test, tweets with pictures won by a huge margin.

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The Buffer Guide to A/B Testing: buff.ly/1n7EsM3

3:02 AM - 11 Apr 2014

Buffer

@bufferFollow

17 RETWEETS 13 FAVORITES

Now sold on the idea of using images, Buffer is toying with the ratio of image to non-

image tweets. They’ve settled on a ratio of 70/30 (pictures/text).

In-stream images aren’t anything new, but few users are making the most of the

feature. It’s a lot easier to pop a few words into a tweet than to use images. However, if

it’s engagement you want, you can’t afford to ignore the data.

#5: Ask for Retweets

People are understandably shy about asking for retweets. In fact, less than 1% of

brands have asked for a retweet. This is a huge missed opportunity.

When you clearly ask your followers for a retweet, you have a good chance of getting

one. Salesforce reports that asking results in 12 times more retweets.

Follow @LFCUSA today & you could win this signed

Brendan Rodgers home shirt! Please Retweet

pic.twitter.com/GFKobEVx9y

11:41 AM - 27 Jul 2014

Liverpool FC @LFC

Follow

1,735 RETWEETS 308 FAVORITES

Here’s a tip: Make sure to spell out the word retweet in its entirety, rather than

using the abbreviation RT. The retweet rate for “retweet” requests is 23 times higher

than the engagement rate for “RT” requests.

I would encourage caution, though. Don’t bombard your audience with constant

requests to spread your message .

#6: Use Hashtags

Hashtags double your engagement rate—they are their own implicit call to action.

Plus, they create higher visibility on Twitter.

What surprises me is that only 24% of tweets contain hashtags. I would caution you

to limit yourself to two hashtags per tweet.

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30 RETWEETS 12 FAVORITES

Tweets that use more than two hashtags have a 17% drop in engagement. You don’t

want that to happen.

Stay in tune with trending or industry-specific hashtags to make sure you’re

cashing in on a valuable source of engagement.

#7: Include Links

Using metrics from Buddy Media, Salesforce reports that 92% of all Twitter interaction

(retweeting, replying, etc.) happens when readers click links. In fact, tweets with links

get way more retweets—86% more , according to research!

8/7/2014 10 Twitter Tactics to Increase Your Engagement | Social Media Examiner

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Links and hashtags make it easy for others to interact w ith your tw eets.

Since tweets with links have higher engagement metrics, you’d think sophisticated

marketers would be using links a lot more. Surprisingly, the percentage of tweets with

links is around 36% (compared with 25% in 2010). Clearly we need to tweet links more

often.

How often? Twitter whiz Dan Zarrella’s analysis suggests you include links in 60-80%

of your tweets as the “sweet spot for retweets.”

#8: Stay Away From Lifestyle Tweets

While celebrities can get away with tweeting about their personal life, brands cannot.

Twitter is less of a personal-life journal and more of a professional marketing platform.

Be real, but don’t be banal.

Dan Zarrella compiled a list of the top 20 least engaging words on Twitter. These

words—such as work, home, watching, tired and tomorrow—are nauseatingly

narcissistic.

Your followers aren’t interested in your personal actions. Few people are going to

engage with a tweet that declares that you’re bored or are going to bed.

#9: Use Strong Calls to Action

Zarrella also listed the most retweeted words, which have a high innate sense of

engagement and most are calls to action. Words like please retweet, help, follow and

how to are focused on the reader of the tweet rather than on the sender of the tweet.

Your followers are much more likely to interact if they are the focus on your tweet and

you’re clearly asking for an action.

#10: Send One to Four Tweets a Day

There is a mistaken belief that the more you tweet, the more ROI you’ll get from

Twitter.

Salesforce data show s you can get more engagement by tw eeting less.

Actually, tweeting too often can result in very poor engagement. This is particularly

true for brands, which need to be careful about coming on too strong with their

marketing.

To up your engagement, constrain your tweeting. While you should actively

respond to DMs and @s, you don’t need to spew forth multiple tweets all day long.

8/7/2014 10 Twitter Tactics to Increase Your Engagement | Social Media Examiner

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Conclusion

These 10 powerful Twitter tactics will help you regain momentum on Twitter. By

implementing these data-backed actionable tips, you’ll be able to create a

compelling presence on Twitter in a very short amount of time .

What do you think? What Twitter techniques do you use to create

engagement? Do you have additional advice for others? Please leave your

comments below.

World business or travel concept photo, Colorful paper stripes with titles of days of the week photofrom Shutterstock.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Neil Patel

Neil Patel is the co- f ounder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar , Str ide, and

KISSmetr ic s . He helps companies like A mazon, NBC, GM, HP and

V iacom grow their revenue. Othe r pos ts by Neil Patel »

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Join the discussion…

• Reply •

Avtar Ram Singh • 8 hours ago

Nice stuff Neil, but I also feel that a lot of this stuff is very gimmicky. I was reading a report

earlier today which said that you get the most amount of retweets at night, and since the

shelf life of tweets is usually very low - that would mean you should tweet a little more at

night, whereas here it says you should tweet during the day.

Second, the one about the tweets length being 110 characters and all of that - sure, there's

a significant amount of research to back that claim up, but quite often you'll see that tweets

that are even 130 characters get a lot of engagement - it all comes down to the content

and what you're tweeting.

Images + Links + Tweet Frequency and all of that we're all hopefully following - so the rest

is a great checklist. :)

2

• Reply •

Dave MacKayu • 32 minutes ago Avtar Ram Singh

I agree that a tweet has little in the way of shelf life, especially for a reader who

follows 100 people and the tweets are coming so quickly that they can not be read.

• Reply •

Ashley Andrews • 4 hours ago

I definitely agree with #3, I always get more replies on weekends. But I can only echo what

@Avtar Ram Singh said before me, I don't think shorter tweets perform better. And a lot

of people simply hit the retweet button without adding any kind of commentary, so they

wouldn't need those 30 characters anyway.

• Reply •

Dave MacKayu • 30 minutes ago Ashley Andrews

I am going to conduct some research..... I have had no retweets for a few days, I

will change my tweets and examine the results. Maybe shorter tweets would allow

people to insert hashtags easily. My tweets are about 100 characters.... so adding

the request was no problem. I tweet about 12 times a day, around the clock as my

market varies. I will be interested to see how many retweets appear.

• Reply •

Meryl van der Merwe • 3 hours ago

I just started intentionally tweeting more frequently and try and have about one tweet per

hour - and since I have done that, my followers and engagement have gone up. If you only

tweet 3 or 4 times each day so many of your followers will miss your tweets if they aren't

on twitter round the time your tweets appear.

2

• Reply •

VirtualAlex • 2 hours ago

Send only 4 tweets a day advice and support is pretty misleading. It should look at TOTAL

engagement rather than average engagement over many tweets. Let's say for example

you have 4 tweets. You could tweet them and get 10 engagements. Or you could tweet

each one three times, morning, afternoon and night. Now you will probably get 20+

engagement, although your average is down.

It also depends on about a hundred things like are all tweet original? Are they duplicates?

How frequently are they going out. I have had great success with Tweet More = Get More

• Reply •

Dave MacKayu • 6 minutes ago VirtualAlex

I have 17 tweets, well now I have 34 as I added 'Please Retweet' and made

duplicates. I agree with 'Tweet More = Get More" but I try to be conservative with

frequency as Twitter may get annoyed. I tweet every 2 or 3 hours 24/7

Dave MacKayu • 35 minutes ago

Thanks Neil, I will take a couple of those suggestions and put them to use.. I would like

people to retweet but my tweets have too many characters..... lesson learned.! I have been

reluctant to ask for retweets until reading your article.

Thanks again for the insights.

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