In my last post I revealed that if you’re a brand with 2000 Twitter followers that tweets three times per day, you’re probably reaching no more than about 150 people. That’s quite shocking to many, and calls into question whether it’s even worth having a Twitter presence. (You can read the maths here.)
However, there is good news and in this post I’ll show you how to increase your reach on Twitter substantially. And perhaps more to the point, how to increase your reach to relevant users. Let’s dive in…
Tip One: Expand Your Topical Scope
Many (if not most) brands stick to talking about their products and their brand messages on Twitter. First, this is dull for followers. Details about your products or brand ambassadors or media coverage or awards might be exciting to you, but the harsh reality is that your followers probably couldn’t care less.
After all, who wants to login to Twitter to be served up sales pitch after sales pitch after sales pitch?
Promotional content should form a fraction of your overall scope of interest and conversation. While many brands tweet about themselves around 90% of the time, you can be smarter than this. Try limiting your self-promotion to between 10% and 20% of your overall tweets.
Brainstorm ideas for what you can talk about the other 85% of the time. If you’re a pet food manufacturer for example, can you talk about pet health issues? Can you talk about issues around pet care? Can you talk about nutrition? Spend half an hour on this and you’ll come up with loads of relevant, topical themes to start conversations around, I promise!
You’ll suddenly find that you can start conversations around relevant but non-product related topics five or six times per day, effectively doubling your initial reach overnight, and more so if people engage with you.
Tip Two: Monitor More Than Just @replies
It’s standard practice for you to read and reply to @mentions on Twitter. At least, I hope it is. But have you considered who’s out there talking about you rather than to you? Do you monitor Twitter for your brand name, and different versions of your brand name such as common mis-spellings? Do you monitor for your brand name as a #hashtag?
There’s often a little goldmine of people you can interact with when you do this. And if you spot something good, by all means retweet it. But @reply to the person as well (and make sure you put a character before the @ sign so that everyone can see your tweet) to start a conversation with them.
Tip Three: Monitor Relevant Keywords
Nervous about joining into others’ conversations on Twitter? Don’t be. As a general rule, Twitter users love it when a brand joins a conversation they started. They’ll respond, they’ll retweet, they’ll follow. The trick is to pick relevant conversations and relevant users.
Let’s say you’re a crisp brand. Using a free dashboard like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck you can set up monitoring for keywords like “crisps” and “snacks” and listen in to what everyone’s talking about. So when someone tweets how much they’d love a packets of crisps right now, you can respond in light tone offering to fly them a packet by helicopter or something similar and have a bit of fun with them (I’m not suggesting you actually do that, by the way!). This is a great way to build up a following of relevant people and enhance your reach significantly.
Follow these three tips and you could see the number of times you tweet increase substantially, the number of people responding to you and retweeting go through the roof, your follower base grow and, consequently, your reach increase by a double digit multiple.
By Paul Sutton, @thepaulsutton
