I’m working with a client to build awareness of her new online ratings app and she was interested in tips on how to engage followers in conversations. As I shared the following suggestions with her, I thought this might make for a good blog post (always interesting in multi-purposing!), so thought I’d share here as well.
These are just a few random thoughts – you may have others. If so, please share! What’s worked best for you to generate interaction on Twitter?
- Get some good material just by monitoring and sharing comments from your web site, blog or customers. The more provocative/unusual (yet relevant), the better.
- Consider short “teasers” designed to pique people’s interest and get them to go to your site. With each of these you would include a link to your site/the review/your blog, etc.
- Make sure to use a tool like bitly.com to shorten the URL’s/links that you use and so you can monitor how many people click on those links.
- Come up with ideas for postings by reviewing the feeds of people you are following and then “retweeting” items that appear relevant or interesting.
- It’s a welcomed courtesy to retweet other people’s tweets and a good way to “make friends” on Twitter.
- You might also monitor interesting news items related to your company/interests and include links to those items for your followers – following news/survey feeds like Pew Research or TopTenTopTen can provide you with lots of material.
- It can also be helpful to monitor the tweets that other people are posting. Find a few people with lots of followers and then go through their tweets to see the type of thing they’re doing to get an indication of what appears to be working and then “copy their style/approach.”
It can be challenging to engage others in interaction on Twitter – much of the “conversation” is very much one-way. But, simply pushing your thoughts out into cyberspace can help to build followers which can drive awareness and, hopefully, traffic to your web site. The bottom line – you want to keep a steady flow of relevant items out there that are of interest to the people following you. Your goals are twofold – to keep them following you and, hopefully, to encourage them to “retweet” your postings.
