Twitter is one of the most valued social media platforms utilized today by organizations and brands who seek to engage and interact with their target audiences. However, if you have one of the 200-plus million registered accounts on Twitter responsible for driving more than 110 million tweets per day, it can be easy to get lost in the conversations.
It is likely that in the early days of your presence on Twitter, you watched the numbers of followers quickly rise as your employees (along with their family and friends), current customers and partners all subscribed to get the latest news on your company. But have you recently reached a plateau in which you are no longer attracting new followers? Or perhaps you have seen a dip as followers choose to unfollow you?
I recently came across a useful article on SocialMediaExaminer.com that shared “4 Tips to Maximize Your Twitter Marketing.” The tips serve as a good reminder on the basics of using Twitter as part of an engagement strategy. We thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the tips shared in this article, in addition to a few other ideas we have learned through our own engagement on Twitter.
- Define your business goals and objectives. When we develop PR strategies for our clients with a social media component, we examine what we want to accomplish by using Twitter and set metrics to measure our engagement against. It’s important that this strategy closely aligns with the organization’s overall business goals and objectives. However once you have an established Twitter presence it’s always a good idea to revisit these goals one to two times a year to make sure they continue to align with your social media strategy. Additionally it’s a good idea to analyze how the community has responded, since launching your presence, as this may also help drive any changes in the strategy.
- Create your conversation strategy. Twitter is about building a community and your success thrives on the ability to form a relationship with your followers. The article suggests “thinking through your conversation strategy and put it in place before you invest time in searching for new people to follow.” At Communiqué PR, we often develop an editorial calendar to ensure we are developing content that aligns with the company’s story arc. In addition, it also allows us to evaluate if we have the right balance of company news, conversation starters and other interesting industry news.
- Organize your community with Twitter Lists. Twitter provides this functionality for a reason – to make it easier for you to focus your engagement with your followers. By breaking up a community into lists, you gain a better understanding of what they are up to and the conversations that are meaningful for them. If you are not familiar with this feature, Twitter provides a great tutorial on how to create them.
- Nurture your Twitter community. It is important to recognize that it takes time and commitment to build a community. The article makes a great recommendation to keep your engagement in perspective and to “start small and build over time” by following a handful of people each week. When we have new followers on our own Twitter channel, we often spend a few minutes to get to know each of them by reading their profile and tweet stream. It provides us with a greater sense of what type of information they value and share with their followers.
What has worked well for you when building your community on Twitter? Do you find the Twitter Lists feature helpful to engage with your community?