Best ways to engage followers on twitter 

You have heard all about the popularity of Twitter. You have created a new twitter profile to promote your brand. You send out tweets and wait for replies. You do not get any. You get frustrated thinking about what you are doing which is not working. Your twitter strategy will be counted as successful only if you are able to entice and engage followers and convince them to be a dedicated follower of you and your service. So what should you do?

Engaging with your followers is at the heart of any successful social media strategy; this especially holds true for Twitter. Twitter is the social media app for real-time dissemination of information; where at any time, engaging in real and sustained conversations is necessary. So for a successful Twitter experience you need to ensure the following: more number of followers, quality followers, engaged and enthusiastic followers; you would also measure the success of your twitter strategy by gauging the number of retweets, mentions you get. And all this comes through engaging successfully!

Here are some best ways to do this.

Use a recognisable and reliable brand image/profile

Good quality and genuine followers look for quality, reliability in the profiles they want to follow. Whether you are using Twitter for your company or for personal purposes, it is important to create an engaging, attractive yet genuine profile. If your profile reflects all these, you would be sure to engage genuine, interested followers.

Your profile also needs to communicate what it you do is and what are your interests in a short and sweet way, so that people get enough information to make a decision. Use a real photo of yourself in the display profile to convey to the world, the “real you”.

Use a real name of yourself for the name section. The username requires that you come up with some really catchy and witty names by which people can tag you in their tweets. Your tweets would show both the real name and username. The twitter @hashtag comes in front of your username.

Twitter is all about engaging in conversations and a human and welcoming face encourages people to interact!

Use location, links and interesting comments in your tweets!

If you are interested in making contact with people in your area of interest in other areas and communicate with them, you can add location to your tweets. When you send out tweets on behalf of your company or a brand you are representing, you can add links to your website in the tweet.

You can use hashtags with key words associated with your interests, who would be picked up by people elsewhere and they will engage with you. The most important thing which followers would check is the quality of your tweets.  Are your tweets delivering useful information? Are they engaging? Do they enlighten the mind? Regardless of how you are using the twitter account, it is always good to deliver some chunks of useful information which will be of benefit to your followers and future followers.

Be responsive

The golden rule to successful engagement in any kind of conversation, be it an online or offline one, is to be responsive to the tweets/mentions you receive in your timeline. Whenever you come online and are on twitter, do check your twitter mentions, replies and any mentions of your brand name or your name or hash tag. Respond courteously and politely, acknowledging the gesture. Re-tweeting others tweets is a form of gracious acknowledgement. It adds more value to your engagement efforts.

Address the recipient by name or twitter handle and give this a personal touch. Avoid using DMs to send messages as many people may find it offensive. Avoid using automation for each and everything including expressing gratitude or just delivering a greeting. The personal touch always works.

Successful engagement is not necessarily about spending a lot of money on your twitter strategy or having the maximum number of followers: it would be measured in terms of the retweets, mentions and replies.

Your followers would make a judgement on you: are you a good conversationalist? A good engager with people? Do you reply to mentions? Are you responsive? The more you score on this; the better would be your engagement! If you do this, you can ensure very high engagement and returns on your engagement, even without spending a lot of money. So, go for it: get real and professional on your Twitter timeline. See the resulting engagement.

Jacey Johnson is a tech blogger and student advisor at www.auassignmenthelp.com she’s focused writing about education, best business practices and marketing research. She had been a member of the English Language Center and has contributed many online publications.