How to increase Twitter engagement rate

With over 330 million monthly active users on Twitter, creating engagement on the platform is increasingly vital for any brand on social media.

To master Twitter engagement, you’ll need a plan that can set your brand apart with your audience. In this article, we’ll go through 10 strategies designed to boost your Twitter engagement. 

What is Twitter engagement rate?

There are four primary forms of audience engagement and interaction on Twitter, including interaction with your page, posts, direct messages, and links off your page. Every day, this translates to your audience interacting with you by: 

• Retweeting

• Replying

• Following

• Liking

• Following your links

• Using hashtags

• Viewing your cards

• Viewing embedded media

• Expanding your tweet

How often your audience does these things is your total number of engagements. Once you’ve got this number, you’ll be able to calculate your Twitter engagement rate. 

Why is Twitter engagement rate important?

Your Twitter engagement rate is the percentage of users who see your posts and engage with them. Your Twitter engagement rate is calculated by taking your number of engagements and dividing them by your impressions, then multiplying this by 100 to get a percentage.

Once you have your Twitter engagement rate, you’ll be able to perform a competitive analysis of your brand's Twitter marketing. This analysis can tell you how your marketing compares to:

• Your competitors.

• Others within your industry.

• Other organizations your size.

Comparing and measuring your Twitter marketing is crucial to making your marketing better, but it doesn’t tell you exactly why Twitter marketing is so important. To answer that, let’s talk about who is on Twitter.

According to Statista, the largest age group on Twitter globally is 25-34 (28.9%) followed closely by 35-49 (28.2%). Twitter has 145 million daily users, and the average user spends three and a half minutes per session on the platform, where they have access to over 500 million new tweets every day. 

Now, while there’s a ton of users on Twitter, marketing on Twitter is difficult, but the very best brands in every industry know that Twitter is essential for their audience, their product, and their bottom line.

Strategies to boost Twitter engagement

The best Twitter engagement strategies are subtle, honest, and rely on customer-focused marketing. Customer-focused marketing is focused on ensuring your marketing is in line with three things: your customers, your products, and your organization’s branding and values. 

For that reason, different organizations need different Twitter engagement strategies. Here are some strategies to get you started:

Use media-based content to show brand personality

The days of bland branding are gone, and the days of brand personality are here. Your brand personality is a set of human characteristics your audience attribute to your brand.

When a person thinks about your brand, they should have some idea about your brand’s personality (how it communicates, its tone of voice, etc.) and what it stands for. One way to think about personality is breaking it up into broad traits or adjectives, and figuring out which ones your brand fits in. For example:

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This is also where audience research comes into play, because your audience may not have the same view of your brand that you do (or that you want them to).

Bringing media-based content into your Twitter marketing is one of the best ways to show your brand personality, as media-based content attracts more engagement than text-based posts. Twitter is the perfect medium for these forms of media content: 

• GIFs

• Short videos

• Images

• Voice-based content like podcasts

• Infographics

When you share media posts, ensure you share high-quality content that is visually engaging, eye-catching, and interesting. For an example of an engaging Twitter post, check out this post by Taco Bell. 

Keep your tweets concise

No one likes reading a long, boring chunk of text – hence the popular phrase, TL;DR (too long, didn’t read). If you want to increase your Twitter engagement, you’ll need to keep your audience engaged by being concise.

Concise tweets aren’t just short; they are easy to understand and can be skim read. Tweets are already limited to a 280-character limit, but that doesn’t mean you have to use every last character!

The longer your tweet, the lower the chances your audience will read to the end, where marketing tweets often include a call to action.

If your audience doesn’t read your CTA, they won’t take any action! If your tweet can be read out loud in less than two breaths, it’s perfect. If you want to see a tweet that’s short-and-sweet in action, check out this post by Chanty.

Respond promptly to tweets

Whether it's a raving review or a (friendly) shout out, anyone appreciates hearing back from a brand they've mentioned.

So replying back with a simple thank you is a great way to let your customers know that you're listening. It's also a great way to show you care, especially if the customer is in dire need for support. 

In other words, responding to your tweets promptly and thoroughly will increase your customer’s loyalty as well as boost your profits. 

Naturally, you’ll want to make every reply a positive experience for customers. When interacting with customers, ensure you always uphold the five standards of excellent customer service:

1. Use strong communication.

2. Be highly knowledgeable.

3. Be proactive and resourceful.

4. Be efficient.

5. Use your interpersonal skills.

Remember, every reply you make reflects on your brand! Every brand receives negative replies sometimes, but it’s better to walk your anger off than respond with a rude comment. 

Tweet at the best times

What’s the value of a great tweet if no one sees it? Not much, I’m afraid.

As mentioned earlier, there are over 500 million new tweets posted to Twitter every day. To try to get your tweets to stand out, you need to time your tweets well. 

Looking at the US, the best time to post on Twitter is often when people are leaving work 5-7 p.m. midweek, and click-through rates are usually highest in the afternoon both during the week and the weekend. However, because of the fast-moving nature of the platform, the specific time to post on Twitter is less important than other platforms.

The key is sending out a good volume of tweets that keeps your brand in your audience’s feed without becoming so annoying that they unfollow. Of course, it’s important to consistently do audience research to see what time your audience is on Twitter and how your audience habits have changed.

A social media analytics tool like Socialbakers can help you do the research to really understand your audience better, and if your ideal time to post isn’t during business hours you can easily use it to schedule posts ahead of time.

Use smart hashtags

Want to increase your brand engagement without investing in extra posts? Embrace the magic of smart hashtags.

Smart hashtags is a feature available on many Twitter marketing apps that helps brands predict popular hashtags to use. When you research a hashtag, smart hashtags show you the number of tweets already posted with that hashtag. 

For best results, choose 3-5 hashtags that:

• Are used regularly.

• Have no double meaning (i.e., #childslaughter).

• Can be capitalized for clarity (i.e., #ChildsLaughter).

If you want to keep your Twitter on-brand and congruent across your marketing team, ensure you add your approved smart hashtags and power words to your content distribution strategy. A content distribution strategy is a document that outlines your brand’s personality and posting guidelines.

Engage with your audience

If you want your audience to engage with you on Twitter, you’ll need to engage first. While media-based content is a great way to engage with customers, interactive content is the best way to get your audience to interact back.

The best forms of interactive content for Twitter include:

• Quizzes

• Polls

• Questions

• Downloadable content

If you want to engage with every person that visits your page, try putting your interactive content in a pinned tweet. Pinned tweets can be easily changed, so feel free to switch them up regularly. For an example of interactive content, check out this pinned tweet by Recruitee.

Use shortened links

We’ve already spoken about keeping your content concise, but what about your links? Clunky, long links can clutter up a tweet and appear spammy to readers. 

To keep your Twitter page clean and professional, shorten your links with a URL shortener. While you’re at it, you should also consider adding a link tracker.

Link trackers will tell you how many of your viewers followed your link, which is a great way to gauge your Twitter marketing effectiveness. This one is a simple tip, but trust me, it works. 

Retweet relevant content

Retweeting influencers and other accounts in your niche is a great way to increase your reach without any extra work. Supplement your Twitter page with high-quality retweets, and you’ll:

• Make friends and partners within your niche. 

• Spotlight smaller brands. 

• Encourage your community to create posts with your hashtag. 

• Expose your content to a broader audience. 

If you want to step up your retweets even more, try retweeting great content about your brand. Customers love feeling appreciated, so make sure you give your brand a hashtag and use user-generated content where possible. 

When it comes to influencers, don’t feel like you need to stick to models and comedians! Some of the best influencer partnerships are done with other business professionals within your industry. For example, check out how Clicdata shares Shane Barker’s article:

Conduct social listening

Social listening is the process of scouring the internet for mentions of your brand, products, and competitors. You can’t really conduct proper social listening manually, so it’s necessary to use a social listening tool in order to collect all of the data that you’ll need in order to gain insights.

Social listening is essential for every brand’s Twitter account, as it will help your brand respond to customer concerns, criticisms, and wishes promptly. If you want to get the most out of your social listening, ensure you measure your net promoter score. This is the percentage of customers who feel positively, negatively, and neutrally about your brand.

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One little tip to help diminish the number of negative mentions of your brand on social media is ensuring that you feature a place for customers to leave feedback on your website’s landing page.

Use Twitter analytics tools

Finally, don’t get stuck managing your Twitter account all by yourself! While writing engaging Twitter posts is crucial, measuring each post’s success is the only way to guarantee continuous improvement. 

The top Twitter analytic tools, like Socialbakers, can help you track your impressions, mentions, sales conversions, and click-through rate, helping you design engaging Twitter posts that convert followers into customers.

Analytics tools will also help you determine whether you are achieving a good Twitter engagement rate. 

According to a poll from the Online Advertising Guide, the average Twitter engagement rate is around 0.5%. Brands with excellent Twitter marketing usually achieve an engagement rate of 1-3%, but anything above that is quite rare.

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The takeaway

Ultimately, the only way to increase your Twitter engagement rate long-term is to maintain a schedule of engaging Twitter posts.

As we detailed in this article, the most engaging Twitter posts are concise, they use media to interact with customers, and they include a clear call-to-action.

Developing the ideal Twitter marketing strategy full of great posts takes time, effort and practice. If at first, you don’t succeed, switch up your strategies, and start again.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.