This article was first published by contributor ccrobert9 on April 29, 2021 and was updated by Lucas Petropoulos on May 10, 2024.

Twitter is considered by many to be the epicenter of cultural shifts; a place where east meets west, where billionaire moguls cross blades with mere mortals through the open combat forum that Twitter (now formally known as ‘X) brings. Don’t be fooled by its innocent use by many though. Twitter is a ruthless judge, jury and executioner of your companies public appearance or brand image.

Engagement refers to any and all interactions your audience has with your content. On Twitter this is any like, retweet, replies, public and private mentions, hashtag usage and so much more. In layman's terms, engagement measures how popular you are on Twitter. Lets make your company the most popular kid in school.

Polls

Interactive content is a surefire way to drive engagement with your audience. Twitter polls allow you to pose questions to your audience and offer a few answers for said question. Voting happens with a swipe of a thumb, making this an easy and extremely effective tool to measure how engaged your audience is.

Here is a great example of how to use polls. Wikidata who "..is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines" wanted to highlight their "SPARQL" query. This poll not only drew my attention to SPARQL as well as Wikidata, but also showed me its not to late to learn.

Customer Interaction

One of the best parts of social media is the power to content to the consumer on an individual level. Twitter is in my opinion, the best platform for this. Instead of plainly relying on your own scheduled content, try out retweeting and quote tweeting others content. Engaging with others will always make them feel more inclined to "return the favor. "

Another great interaction is to directly reply to customers tweets. Take a lesson from one of the best corporate Twitter accounts, Wendy's Fast Food.

By simply replaying to a mention they got, Wendy's crafted a Tweet that would almost gain 100,000 likes.

Treating you customers as part of the conversation makes your brand more approachable and will prove to be a powerful marketing tool.

Whilst having a brief interaction over Twitter may not give us the non-verbal cues that an in-person interaction would, such as body language and tone of voice, we have the help of social media listening tools such as Sprout Social instead. By linking a platform to your Twitter handle, you can really dig into what content flies and what flops. Twitter Analytics is an excellent in-house starting option too. Your tweets may be on the money, but if half your audience is asleep, your content may fall upon deaf ears. By giving special attention to where your followers live, what content they digest and what times they are active, you too could be the next Wendy’ in the social media space

Visual Content

Want to make sure someone clicks on your tweet? You better give them something to click on then. This is easily done by incorporating pictures and videos into your Twitter repertoire.

According to a tweet from the Twitter Business official account "A study of 3.7 million accounts showed that Tweets with a GIF gained 55% more engagement than those without. (Source: Twitter Analytics, 2023)"

Have you found a secret ingredient to boost engagement with your audience?

Let us know in the comment section below!

References:

Sprout Social: Social Media Management Solutions. (n.d.). Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com

Twitter. (2023). Twitter Analytics. Analytics.twitter.com. https://analytics.twitter.com/about