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20 Tips for Growing Your 2020 Twitter Audience

20 Tips for Growing Your 2020 Twitter Audience

Twitter fame doesn’t happen overnight. It takes hard work, dedication, and a keen eye that’s always looking to be ahead of the next trending hashtag for your Twitter audience. But is it really worth the effort?

If you like making sales, bringing in new customers, and engaging with the community that is interested in what you’re selling, then it’s a resounding, “Hell yeah.”

According to Neil Patel, Twitter audiences are 64% more likely to buy from brands that they follow.

Pew Research notes that 1/4 of American men (24%) and women (25%) are on the site.

Hootsuite shows that it is rapidly growing as a search engine, fielding more than 2 billion queries every. single. day.

If you aren’t tweeting, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to market to people who are desperately seeking brand engagement. They want to know who you are, what you’re doing, and why they should be interested. They want an easy and quick way to see your promos, contact your customer service, and demo your newest apps…

THEY WANT YOU ON TWITTER.

To help you kick off your meteoric rise to Twitter fame, we’ve put together 20 strategies you can implement in 2020. Play around with some or all of them, but your goal is to find the sweet spot that helps you get noticed.

1. Use Scheduling Software

It’s been proven that accounts who tweet more tend to have more followers… A lot more. It might seem like common sense, but many smaller brands tend to let their social media presence fall to the wayside when other projects are being prioritized. This can come at the cost of losing followers, and certainly not gaining new ones.

While we’d all love to spend our day engaging in lighthearted conversation with our clients and customers, it’s not typically something that we can squeeze into our schedule. Your best bet is to invest in a scheduling software like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social to establish a few baseline tweets for the week, which you are always welcome to supplement as the need arises.

2. Retweet Other Users Who Share Relevant Content

Retweeting is huge social currency on Twitter. Not only are you showing the writer that you’re paying attention to their content, you’re also helping them market by sharing their name with your followers. In the future, those folks are more likely to reciprocate by retweeting your content with their followers.

3. Tag the People or Brands That You’re Talking About

This harkens back to retweeting and reciprocity. When you quote someone, share an article from their website, or even mention that you use their product, be sure to tag them in it. In many cases, a brand will retweet you to their audience, especially if you’re saying nice things.

Boom. Instant audience outreach, just for being nice.

4. Research When Your Audience is Online

Finding the right times to send out your tweets is an art and a science. Fortunately for us, some magical artsy scientists have already pegged down posting peaks and valleys by industry and demographic. A good rule of thumb: The best time to tweet is when your specific Twitter audience is most likely to be online.

5. Tweet Catchy Quotes and Sayings

Put your design skills to good use and create inspirational, silly, or catchy quote graphics. They are insanely shareable, especially if you cash in on hashtags like #MotivationMonday.

6. Have a Good Sense of Humor

There are countless memes that prove Twitter is the social media platform where people and businesses alike come to showcase their wit and humor.

There’s just something about that little blue bird that makes brands let loose. If it’s in your MO to use memes and snarky hashtags, this is your chance to do it. Just don’t make it weird.

7. Don’t Forget to Pin Your Tweets

If you have an incredible promo going on, pin it to the top of your page! Every time someone visits your profile, it will be the first thing they see, which means that your 50% discount won’t be lost amongst the cat pictures and videos of skateboarders busting their nards.

8. Never, Ever Buy Followers

Buying fake followers to up your Twitter audience might help you pad out your follower count, but you’ll soon find yourself in the sole company of stock-photo bots. Your real audience will be able to sniff out the ploy from a mile away, and they’re definitely going to question why your entire audience consists of the equivalent of sentient mannequins.

9. Tweet Enough… But Not Too Much

While true that tweeting more can net you more followers, that’s only true to a certain point. If you start flooding the feed, you’ll have a nasty case of diminishing returns on your hands. Make like Goldilocks and find the frequency that’s just right.

10. When Creating Content Off of Twitter, Put A “Tweet This” Button

Make it easier for your audience to quote you by coding Tweetable links into your blog posts. Pull out powerful insights, statistics, or turns of phrase that your audience would be interested in sharing.

The fewer steps there are between reading the blog post and tweeting out the quote, the more likely your audience is to share it. Be warned though: It’s all about quality, not quantity. Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a blog, but we’re still tweeting his ideas. Make sure that the quote is worth sharing.

11. Look Through Trending Topics

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Keep an eye on trending topics and participate in them when it makes sense to your brand. It’s a great way to be seen by people who are organically interested in the same subjects that your brand is pertinent to.

Twitter’s Business Blog encourages you to creatively bring your brand into a variety of conversations, as long as you are remaining authentic.

“There may be times when a conversation on Twitter feels relevant to the core values of your business. Don’t shy away from taking part when this happens. It makes your brand feel relatable and helps people understand what you stand for and support. Often a simple, heartfelt approach is best.”

12. Respond When People Talk to You

After you’ve snagged yourself some followers, your Twitter audience efforts change from acquisition to retention. Let your followers know you’re listening by monitoring your mentions and responding in kind. Nobody likes being left on read, especially after you’ve poured so much time into cultivating a budding relationship.

13. Check Your DMs

Schedule a couple of times everyday to check your DMs. Often, followers will send you customer service questions here instead of tweeting them to the public. It helps keep private information, like account numbers, safe and you get the chance to take care of the issue before it escalates. There’s also a good chance that they’ll tweet a shout out in return for your help.

14. Get Noticed with Twitter’s Ad and Promo Tools

Like Facebook, Twitter has some special features for businesses that allow you to pay for ad space and promoted tweets. We wrote extensively about how that works last week, but the basic premise is that your marketing tweets are funneled directly to the feeds of the demographics who are most interested in what your brand has to offer.

15. Self-Promote Your Freebies, Offers, and Discounts

With Twitter audiences quickly shifting to using the social media platforms as a search engine, neglecting to tweet out great deals, product launches, and sales information is a bad move for your business. There’s no shame in tweeting out a coupon code for your followers.

16. Think 80/20

People aren’t following your Twitter just for the sake of being mindless consumer cattle who bow to every beckoning call of brands on social media. They want you to be entertaining, engaging, and show your personality. Give the people what they want.

Strike the right balance by remembering the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your posts should be personal, relateable, and interesting without trying to make a sale. That can include retweets or original content.

The other 20% can be shameless self-promotion, discounts, and information about products.

17. Participate in a Twitter Chat

Twitter chats are scheduled, moderated conversations that happen around a particular subject of interest. Typically, brands who host them will do so on a semi-regular basis, with reminders tweeted out to garner interest.

These chats center around questions or discussion topics that are posed by the moderator. Other users answer the question, respond to one another, often follow new participants, and generally function as a short-form “forum,” right there in their feed.

These chats are perfect for long-tail marketing because you’re able to hone in on very, very niche communities. It’s perfect for being seen by the exact demographics you’re interested in and really pushing your brand out there for people who are truly interested in what you have to offer.

18. If Something Goes Wrong, Take the L

More followers means more opportunities for marketing efforts to fall flat.

We don’t have to rehash the infinite number of ways that a brand’s attempts at social media could go horribly, horribly wrong, but we do know that the best way to recover is to genuinely admit your wrongdoing. When it comes to the fickle world of online marketing, one slip up could cost you a lot, but stubborn pride could cost you everything.

Even if the mistake was made due to ignorance or being unaware of current events, being defensive is the last thing you want to do.

Volusion summarizes this point well: “Customers appreciate the fact that there are humans behind brands, and sometimes we all make mistakes. It is very important to be completely transparent, because not telling the whole truth is sometimes just as bad as the mistake you made in the first place.”

19. Specialize Your Posts for Your Twitter Audience

If you’re going to make similar posts for all of your social media profiles, ensure that the formatting and content is differentiated by platform. Having 60 hashtags on your LinkedIn post because it was originally made for Instagram is a sign that your social is on autopilot. Take the time to research socially acceptable posting etiquette, according to platform, so that your social media looks well-attended and polished.

20. Use Emojis and Bitmojis As a “Sometimes Treat”

Whenever you’re writing a post for social media, it’s tempting to bring in fun emojis to spice up your content. Some content calls for emojis, and some just don’t. Use it sparingly, when it really makes sense in the context of the post.

For example, if it’s Ice Cream and Puppies Day at your office, you could get away with tweeting “We love and Day!

If you’re letting the world know that a coworker was tragically lost in a boating accident, you should probably avoid a funeral photo-op and a caption that says.

Above All Else, Stick with It

Unfortunately, there is no legitimate way to blow up on Twitter overnight unless divine providence reaches down and blesses you. You’re going to have to work for it, find ways to be engaging, and deal with a few failures. At the end of the day, your goal should not be social media stardom. It should be a solid foundation of followers who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. The rest is just gravy.

Keep it out there, y’all.

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