3 Tips for Expanding Tweet Reach and Engagement

Twitter feeds keep flowing with over 9000 tweets every second (Source: http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/). Unless your followers are constantly watching their twitter stream the chances are that your tweets will not be seen by a lot of them.  Below, I have listed three tips that will ensure that your tweets/content gets noticed and reaches most of your followers.

1. Tweet Same Content Multiple Times in a Day  – There are a lot of people like me who log into twitter few times a day (or after a gap of few days) and then and do a quick scan of timeline (or search).  They go back few hours in their twitter timeline and if your tweet did not happen to be in the timeline or searches at that time then they never see it.  Keeping this in mind, you need to tweet same content multiple times in a day to make sure your tweets are in the timelines of most of your followers when they login to twitter. In my post “Best Time to Tweet”, I suggested following timeline to tweet (this is just a suggestion and you should figure out your own timeline based on your followers and goals)
   1. Tweet at 9:00 AM PST (If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 9:00 AM in your time zone).
   2. Tweet again the same message at 1:00 PST (4:00 EST) – (you might skip this if your followers are local.
   3. Tweet again the same message at 4:00 PST( If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 4:00 PM in your time zone).
   In addition, I suggest adding another one later in the evening.
2. Tweet Same Content on Different Days – If you have content that is evergreen then it make sense to tweet it again. Just like above, it might take few tweets over few days/months to get your tweets noticed by your followers. Additionally, tweeting your content again after few days/months will put your content in front of your new followers and those who might have missed it previously.  However, going overboard with such strategy can potentially cause issues with some of you long time and ardent followers as they will see the same message over and over again. I use this strategy to tweet my old blog posts, which results in new retweets and followers. (I do it automatically- more on this in future).
3. Add Images to your Tweets – Late last year, Twitter started showing full images (instead of a link) in the timeline, just like Facebook does. A study (http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-power-of-twitters-new-expanded-images-and-how-to-make-the-most-of-it) showed that tweets with images got 150% more rewteets than tweets without images.  I suggest, you start including images in your tweets, when it make sense, and do your own tests to see how images affect the engagement with your tweets.

Follow me on twitter at @anilbatra