7 Twitter Tactics For Audience Growth

Success on Twitter is related to thinking strategically about how to leverage Twitter as part of your broader online marketing and social media efforts.

It’s no more about collecting a herd of followers but rather about engagement, retweets and likes!

Twitter is a rather intimidating social platform, with so much noise and so many experts on every topic known to man. So how can you stand out?

While it may seem that you need some sophisticated Twitter strategy to dominate on Twitter, in reality if you ace a few simple tactics, you can tap into a community of like-minded followers who will drive traffic to your website and support your work.

Irrespective of whether you are a tiny minnow or a big fish in the Twitter pond, use these tactics to make it bigger and generate more traffic for your content today:

1. #knowyouradience – Find out who is following you

If you’ve build a hefty following but are struggling to engage with them, the problem lies in you not knowing your followers.

Focus your time and effort into understanding your current followers instead of chasing new ones, to effectively engage them.

An excellent audience tracker tool is Followerwonk from Moz. It helps give you an idea of who is tracking your moves. Most features are available for free, but if you manage more than one account, the premium version comes with added features that can track all your account followers.

followerwonk-for-twitter

One of its finest features is a word cloud that is generating by visualizing keywords from your audiences’ bio, that help you find common denominators among your followers and understand them.

You can also learn their most active times and schedule tweets when the highest number of followers are active.

2. #createawesomecontent – Win them with fabulous, informative and engaging content

Once you know who you followers are, you can tailor your content accordingly.

Provide then with engaging, enlightening, unique and informative content that caters to their taste.

Use your social media accounts to drive them to your content thus forming a complete strategic inbound marketing.

Don’t just keep self-promoting, see what’s trending and jump in on the discussions, you can also be share content from others that may please the palate of your current followers, by adding your own unique spin on the story as well as a link to the original trusty source.

3. #keepitconcise – The lesser the words, the easier to digest

Social media powerhouse, Buffer, researched and revealed that the optimum length of a tweet teeters between 71-100 characters, even though the limit is a legendary 140 characters.

If you are maxing out your character count, your tweets are too long.

Twitter is a platform that encourages crisp and to-the-point content, which prompts the readers to quote and respond to your tweet.

So keep it short, sweet and snappy.

4. #getvisual – Give them the stunning visuals they deserve

In a text dominate Twitter stream, a tweet accompanied by an image is sure to stand out.

A graphically appealing Twitter post is sure to get more retweets, likes and earn you followers. Even adding text to a simple image can be simple yet effective.

To find quality images that are free (and copyright free), use Unsplash, Flickr copyright free images, Free Range Stock, or browse through the free iStock images released every week.

twitter-images-beautiful

You can also purchase a subscription to iStock, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Thinkstock or one of the many other databases of stock images.

Using a high quality image is sure to bring more attention to your post than plain old text.

5. #hashtagaway – The right hashtag can take you far

We hear it all the time that hashtags get your tweets more coverage, but a lot of us over-use this feature. To get the right coverage and expand your audience, what you need is the right hashtag.

Ritetag or Hashtags.org are great sites to discover and learn about hashtags that are most popular and will connect you to your target audience. Whereas sites like What The Trend reveal trending hashtags that you can occasionally tap into also.

Also pay heed to the hashtags your influences are using, that way you can utilize the same ones to meet the right audience.

Use one or two hashtags, as long as they are the right ones, you will get the desired result.

6. #twittervideo – Show rather than tell

Twitter video is a seriously underused feature that can win bonus on engagement.

Living in a visual world, we are all suckers for videos – the information is compact and backed by audio and visual. It becomes much easier to take in.

Not to mention, you can say so much more in a video than you could in 140 characters.
So don’t keep your tweeting limited to words, use videos!

7. #referenceright – Introduce the right people in your content

Don’t hesitate to use outside sources to uplift your account and share great content. However, always be sure to include the author of the article you are linking, or the brand or company involved, in order to get a retweet or a mention.

Follow the same rule when including social influencers in your field – the prominent, popular people with a huge following. A retweet or mention by the right person can get carried far and wide.

This can help create thousands of impressions but this is another tactic that you should not exploit, too much of this can overwhelm your references. Remember, balance is key.

So, what are you waiting for? See you on Twitter!

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