When it comes to managing your social media channels, boosting engagement and delivering results can be difficult. It’s all well and good scheduling tweets and promoting your products, but there’s little point if you don’t get any traction from your efforts. Below, we’ve put together just three ways you can boost engagement from your Twitter channel and convert followers to customers.
Respond to all of your new followers
When a new user follows your brand, how do you react? Do you send them a welcome tweet, drop them a direct message, or do they go untouched? Reaching out to every new follower is one of the best ways of creating traction from social media – and it doesn’t have to be difficult.
If you use a service to send auto direct messages to new customers, you may be doing more harm than good. Leading social analysts argue that such messages are bad for your brand – they’re impersonal, spammy and are often ignored by followers. Instead, you should consider sending every new follower a welcome tweet – whether that’s reaching out manually or relying on an automatic service like Audiense, which was designed to increase engagement.
It’s also important to remember to respond to every individual tweet you receive – ask questions, thank them for their support and direct them to your website or useful resource hubs for assistance. If your followers go ignored, the chances are that they’ll jump to a more engaged, active competitor.
Follow relevant users in your target market
While spamming every Twitter account under the sun isn’t going to change your business’ fate, getting the attention of potential customers can be as simple as pressing the follow button.
Users will see that they’ve got a new follower, and are likely to check out your Twitter profile and give you a follow back if they find something useful. Taking advantage of Twitter’s new Dashboard service, which allows you to display your customer service response times and a large ‘Message’ button on your profile, makes sense – making your brand more approachable and ready to help.
Some Twitter management tools have been designed to filter profiles without avatars, that haven’t been active recently and that follow your competitors, so research into services like Crowdfire or Unfollowers if you want to save time and find only relevant accounts for your industry.
Curate content from other websites
We’ve already talked about why blogging is essential for your business marketing, but that doesn’t mean that everything you post on social media has to come from your own mouth.
The insulated approach to social media, where you only talk about and post from your own website, can actually be detrimental to your overall marketing campaign. Your followers like variety and the chances are that they are far more interested in relevant, engaging content than your consistent brand messages and promotional tweets.
By curating content from some of the very best blogs within your niche, you will be able to provide a truly valuable resource for your customers and potential clients – much more than you’d be able to do by blogging about everything yourself. What’s more, those influential bloggers may even see your tweets and reward you with a retweet or a link back to your blog, so share posts when you can.
There are hundreds of applications on the market to help you with your content curation, but some of our favourites include Pocket and Flipboard, allowing you to both save and discover new content that is relevant to your industry – and access the material from any of your devices.
Creating a content calendar for your social media channel – which you can then use on other sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, too – also makes sense. Set a schedule, use services like Hootsuite or TweetDeck to post content when you’re not around, and you should see that you develop a more engaged, interactive social media following that you can then use to boost your sales and leads.
If you don’t have the time to manage your social media platforms, then let the social media experts at JAK help. We have years of experience managing clients across a whole host of industries and can tailor our management packages to suit your needs. Email us on sales@jakinc.uk, call us on 0191 3882 698 or click here to visit our website.