How to Generate Engagement on Twitter

Twitter has gone a very long way since its launch and is now considered an integral part of online business tools absolutely necessary in an increasingly competitive environment. As such, more and more businesses, along with individuals, are ending up on Twitter as they seek more ways to tell everybody about their product or service, increase their reputation and generally make as much interesting noise as possible. This also explains why the number of active profiles on Twitter keeps steadily increasing and why it is so hard nowadays to go without it.

However, many users still fail at using Twitter effectively. Although signing up on Twitter and sporadically posting tweets is as easy as it gets, it is a more difficult task to actually make the most out of one of the world’s most popular social networks and without much doubt the most popular micro-blogging platform of all time. One thing most new Twitter users struggle with is generating enough user engagement to justify continue using it.

Although Twitter assuredly looks like very simple website, there are actually various ways of gauging engagement. A retweet is the simplest form of engagement as more people are thus going to see your content. However, another user addressing you directly via Twitter is also a sign of engagement as anybody who visits this profile before that tweet gets lost in time will also see it. People who are already following that user will also automatically see it in their feed and are thus more likely to find your profile. There are simple ways to generate engagement on Twitter without having to post questions all day long and hoping someone is nice enough to respond to you.

Lower your Twitter expectations

One thing about Twitter is that the buzz around it has led to many people considering it as a quick fix to drastic problems. Unfortunately, many new users are still turning to Twitter with such great expectations that even Charles Dickens would struggle to keep them satisfied. In fact, most users who suddenly stopped using Twitter and are pretty vocal about how it is a useless tool. As such, the first thing you should do is to keep your expectations to a minimum and to understand that you need time to start generating engagement on a regular basis.

Work on your content

The quality of your tweets will directly determine how much engagement you can generate on Twitter. Simply posting bland updates and generic messages everybody has already seen is the surest way of ensuring that nobody notices you. This is why your content absolutely needs to be unique. Thankfully, “unique” here does not simply mean that nobody should have come out with it before. Being among the first to tweet about a trending topic is also a great way of climbing above the masses.

Focus on interacting with other users

Unique content is a great way of generating engagement on Twitter, but actually getting involved with other users, let alone influencers, is another effective way of doing so. It’s obvious that you will not always be able to come up with unique content and tweets that will get Twitter buzzing. This is why you should also take the time to get involved with other users by tweeting at them, participating in discussions and generally being helpful.

Make your tweets personal

Users are on Twitter because they want to be heard, and so are you. As such, there is nothing easier than making your tweets personal to increase the engagement you get on Twitter. A very simple example is when you may be tweeting the same content to many people. While Twitter does give you the possibility to very easily address multiple users with the same short message, this is a good situation where you may be harming your own chances of having real engagement.

In this example, it would be more effective and rewarding to take the time to craft a unique message for each user and to address each of them separately. This in turn increases the chances of those users tweeting back to you.

The author is the webmaster of the Formation Réunion blog, the official website for news from the island of Réunion.