How to increase engagement on Twitter when switching to a professional account
High interaction can be overwhelming at first, but consider how you can leverage the tool for impact.
I’ve been on Twitter for almost five years now. But it wasn’t until this week that I checked my analytics for the first time. I didn’t even know this was something you could see.
After looking through many of my past tweets, I noticed that what got me more impressions is tagging people and using hashtags.
Another one was, instead of replying directly under someone’s comment, I would see more impressions when I would quote a tweet.
My top two tweets in the past month both had something in common — they had something that you could click on and engage with.
The tweet that saw the most impressions was the pictures I took when I covered President Trump’s visit to the Lehigh Valley for my student newspaper. I don’t think the reason they reached so many people was because they were good photos. It was because you could easily click on this and view them.
The tweet that got the second most impressions was the article that I wrote for my internship with Major League Lacrosse this summer. I tagged MLL on Twitter, they interacted with it — and they have almost 84,000 followers—which I believe drove my traffic.
Something I found interesting was that my profile visits went up 121.5% and I reached 31,000 people on Twitter — an increase of 64.8%. It’s amazing how many people were drawn to my Twitter just in the last 30 days. I would have thought maybe 5,000 people viewed my profile, but this wasn’t the case.
It’s pretty cool because you can see how powerful social media is and how many people you can draw for free. But it’s also scary at the same time since I have only 550 followers.
Despite having 550 followers, I have a very mixed community of people that follow me. I created my account when I was 15, so I have my high school friends there, my college friends, and now I have some of my colleagues.
So I noticed as I transitioned into more of a professional account, I started to lose some of my followers who may not want to follow that.
With that being said, since I want to work in the sports journalism community someday, I am starting to tweet more about it and see a bigger following and more engagement from those types of people. My sports tweets are getting more attention than any other type of other tweets.
I think I could improve my numbers by posting more photos and articles that correlate with want I want to talk about. People liked seeing them on my Twitter, and it showed.
What I plan to do is to keep making my Twitter more professional as I go. Eventually, I am going to lose my high school followers, but it doesn’t matter to me.
While it may be scary to see all of the people who see your page each day, it’s cool to see how many people you can reach in such little time. It’s a great marketing tool if you perfect it.
