How to increase (and manage) Twitter engagement
Have you ever asked yourself why do people (or you) retweet or favourite some post/tweet?
I’ve been doing SMM for several months at App in the Air and as a Data Scientist and just lover of System Thinking tried to find some patterns why do people behave in a certain way (retweet, reply, comment, share, favourite, etc.). Here I’ll cover my findings on Twitter.
I was able to increase average engagement rate (how do people click on post, retweet, reply, click on profile and other Twitter events) by 2,5 times just by observing and learn follower’s behaviour:
Our account has some specific style. We post interesting photos of airplanes, airports, beautiful views from the airplane window etc. So people who follow us expect this from us.
Rule #1: Post things that your followers expect to see.
One day I started to post on Twitter via Instagram’s built-in Twitter share. Why? It’s more easy than use another app, write same text, find same photo and post again. The result is something like this:
Well, engagement fell down 10 times to around zero (0,6%). Moreover it gain almost no new Instagram followers (from the link to Instagram post). Neither so desired retweet.
I did around 19 tweets to test this behavior. Again, no actions. They expect photos, but there was a link to photo. Then I started to make experiments.
Rule #2: People tend to retweet interesting and funny photos.
So our users expect from our account aviation photos. I posted this few days later:
Same number of followers, but engagement jumped 12 times compared to previous post. What’s interesting in this photo? It’s unusual and “I bet my friends doesn’t see such picture, so I retweet” — thats what person thinks. Next day:
“There is the fact that I bet again my followers doesn’t know. I retweet.” So, what about funny stuff?
Same story.
Of course, some interesting and funny photos gain a bit more favourite than retweet (see it as exception from the rule), but the absolute number is still not zero and the gap between then is not big.
Rule #3: People tend to favourite useful or remarkable things.
Ok, I’ve fond some pattern so people start to retweet my posts. That’s cool. What should I do to nudge them favourite my tweets? I started to think like this: it’s some kind of “save for later”. Something that I want to recall in the future.
I post this:
This is more fact, than cool picture. Got ratio 5:1.
The combination of nice picture and interesting fact.
Take out:
- Use Twitter’s native mechanisms(not links to photo, but upload photo): don’t be lazy ☺
- Interesting and funny photos push people to retweet
- Useful or remarkable things nudge people to favourite tweets
Call to action:
- Go to Twitter analytics and explore your account stats
- Analyse your tweets that has different proportion of retweets and replies
- Use these fidings to manage behavior of your followers
Share your finding in the comments to this post ☺
P.S. even with different pictures and direct questions it’s hard to see any patterns why do people reply, yet. I’ll continue to explore this case.
