Social media followers are crucial to increase your customers. However, it can be a hassle to think of ways to increase your follower count, especially for start-ups. So, here are three simple yet effective ways to boost engagement and have your twitter follower count go through the roof!
- Have some personality and utilize online tools
Have some personality in your tweets! The last thing you want to do as a company is to be a robot that spams promotional content every hour. What I mean by this, is to become more creative and show your followers that there’s an actual human being behind the account. This creates a whole new fondness from your followers, and eventually get favorites and retweets which will potentially increase your followers. However, I’m not saying scheduling your tweets should be avoided. There are great social media management tools out there, such as Hootsuite that allows you to seamlessly manage and engage with your followers on social media with one simple dashboard. Click Here to learn more about Hootsuite. In fact, posting regularly will largely increase your visibility, so it’s a crucial factor to increase your follower count.
According to beevolve, a social media analytics company, shows data that backs up the claim, by analyzing 36 million twitter profiles and 28 billion tweets. It’s pretty obvious, I know. But it’s also a fact that people forget about it often.
What I’m saying is, don’t just be tweeting posts about future updates, app features, and so on. It’ll be redundant over time, and honestly followers are expecting more than this. Occasionally post humorous content that’ll make your followers laugh! For example, tweet some popular memes that has some connection with your product. That way, followers will emotionally engage with your content, and the potential to get retweets and favorites will skyrocket.
2. Retweet relevant tweets and articles
Tweeting about your product and your company is certainly important. However, try to search and find influencers that are knowledgeable in your domain, and share those content on your twitter page. According to a study done by researchers at Rutgers University, the way people and corporations use and utilize twitter can be classified to two distinct groups: Meformers and Informers.
Reformers are ones who regularly post social media updates about themselves, and
Informers are ones post updates that are mostly information sharing.
And they found out that informers had two times the followers of meformers. This clearly indicates that you should reach out start sharing and retweeting more content from other influencers that are in your expertise. However, I know it’s a bit time consuming to go through billions of tweets and articles to find the relevant posts. And yes, there’s a great web application for that. It’s called anewstip.com, and it allows you to find relevant media contacts by tweets or news articles with a single click. You can search for any keyword, and it shows what kind of tweets are made by who and it ranks people by influence points. It also sends you alerts when a journalist or a company mentions anything related your keyword in a tweet, once per day for free users. This can be altered to once per hour, but you have to be a paid customer ($49/month). As if that were not enough, the amazing application lets you pitch journalists with personalized messages, so you can directly engage with the influencers about your product for further connections.
3. Freebies and discounts!
Who doesn’t like free stuff? Definitely not me, and probably you too. The infographic below was created by Nielsen, a global consumer and media insight company, for Twitter UK.
As you can see, “To be notified of special offers/promotions” is ranked number two out of 10 reasons why people follow brands on twitter. More than half of the people who follow brands are expecting some kind of discounts exclusive for social media followers. Basically, just give things away. It can be anything small, if consumers see benefit for following the brand, you might see your followers grow.
Sources:
Lee, K. (2014, May 21). Get more followers on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and more: 6 research-backed strategies [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://get-more-blog.bufferapp.com/followers-twitter-facebook-research
Naaman, M., Boase, J. & Lai, C. (2009). Is it really about me? Message content in social awareness streams. In Proc. CSCW’09.