Twitter can be one of the most important platforms that you can use to promote yourself, whether you want to get more traffic to your business website or blog, or just have a good means of connecting with people for your own views, thoughts and jokes! Of course, Twitter is not just about broadcasting things, you really want to get some dialog going and to know people are reacting to what you post. It can therefore be very frustrating when you aren’t getting the level of replies or retweets you’d hope for proportional to the number of followers you have. So what are some of the reasons why your followers may not be engaging?
People Aren’t Seeing Your Tweets
Twitter is extremely fast moving, and people’s feeds end up with thousands of tweets in them every day. It is virtually impossible for anyone who follows a reasonable number of accounts to see everything, and not everyone is checking Twitter constantly. This means your links to your posts or cleverly crafted Tweets are only seen by a proportion of your followers.
Do some research into what time of day your followers are most active. Are they mainly in your time zone? Are they people who seem to go on Twitter at lunchtime? Schedule your tweets rather than posting them when you feel like it, especially if you work at hours when you wouldn’t expect your main audience to be online. Also, if you have something you are very keen to have seen, like a link to your latest article or a special offer, don’t be afraid to keep tweeting it throughout the day and then tweet some links to it later in the week too.
Your Tweets Don’t Draw Attention
Your tweets may not be catching the eye of the people who see them – possibly because you are still doing things the way you used to when Twitter was new. While you are still limited to 140 characters, a lot more tweets have images these days, and these not only take up more screen real estate for your followers, they also draw the eye. Using a good image in your tweets will get them noticed, and inspire more engagement.
You Aren’t Engaging Either
Don’t expect your followers to make the first move. Many Twitter accounts just broadcast things, and don’t really ‘talk’ to other users. If your account appears to be one of them, people will be less likely to engage with you as they won’t be expecting a response. Reply to other people’s tweets, or as specific users what they think in your posts. The more you are tweeting at others, the more they will engage.
Getting engagement from your Twitter users is something that requires you to actively chase it. Ask for retweets, start conversations, and make your tweets stand out, as well as making sure the largest possible audience sees your most important tweets by timing them right and repeating links to your best content.
