Twitter is a social media app that let’s people share info via tweets, 140 character (or less) messages. To increase your reach on Twitter, you want to accumulate as many followers are possible. A notable difference between Twitter and Facebook is how they decide to show your posts in users’ feeds. Facebook uses an algorithm that determines what posts to show to a user, and in what order, based on previous engagement levels (i.e. how often posts evoked actions from users - a click, like, share, or comment). Twitter on the other hand shows all posts from people followed in chronological order. This means that while it behooves you to attract followers that will engage with your tweets, engagement doesn’t carry the same weight as it does on Facebook.

Grow Organically

Similar to your website, when you consistently share valuable informative content, you’ll start to create a following. People will start to stumble upon your posts as the search for topics. As new users find your tweets, they’ll retweet your posts to share it with their followers and you’ll attract more people to you.To help people find your tweets, use #hashtags in your tweets. Hashtags are a way of communicating what your tweets are about and attract views.However, avoid the temptation of using too many hashtags because your tweets #tend #to #start #looking #spammy #and #discourages #people #from #following #you. Try to limit yourself to no more than a couple of hashtags per tweet.

Tweets that Get the Most Engagement

You want to know what tweets receive the most engagement? Well here it is straight from the horse’s mouth - Twitter conducted it’s own survey and this is what they found:

• Photos average a 35% boost in Retweets
• Videos get a 28% boost
• Quotes get a 19% boost in Retweets
• Including a number receives a 17% bump in Retweets
• Hashtags receive a 16% boost

Twitter did find that these results varied by industry, so your mileage may vary. To determine how the aforementioned impacts your tweet engagement, sign-up for a free Twitter Ads account (http://ads.twitter.com). In there you can view your tweet analytics to see what your audience responds to most:

Join the Conversation

Something nice about Twitter is that you can see other users tweets without being followers of theirs (unless the user has their settings set so that only followers can see their tweets). That makes it easy to start up discussions with others. It takes some digging sometimes because of the sheer volume of tweets, but it’s a good way to attract potential customers and build your follower base.For example, let’s say you’re a law firm. You may do daily searches on “lawyer” to see if there are some conversations you get involved with. Here are some ones we found with a search:

Just from a few tweets within the past ten minutes, you’ve found some people that may be prospects or people you might be able to interact with. Aside from maybe getting business from these people, by replying to them, you are not a part of a public conversation that others may see. This creates a multiplier effect where many people than just the original tweeter becomes exposed to you, and your offerings.

Reciprocation

One interesting behavior from Twitter is that if you follow someone, they will many times do likewise Therefore, one strategy employed by Twitter users is to follow others that they think may be interested in their tweets. If you use this technique, don’t get carried away and use it in moderation.Twitter tries to stop users from going crazy by setting limits on how many users it thinks is reasonable to follow within a certain time frames (i.e. daily, weekly, etc.). When you hit that limit, Twitter will let you know and you have to slow down adding followers and/or shed some people that you follow. Try to follow a maximum of 100 users per day to stay under daily thresholds.There are several ways to find users to follow, who are also interested in your tweets. One way is to do searches on Twitter and follow people who come up in the results who you think are a good fit based on what they tweet about.Another way is to use a free tool like Tweetpi. Tweetpi will allow you to find users who may be interested in your tweets by showing you followers of users you specify. For example, if you’re a book seller, you may want to target Goodreads followers because you know they’re into reading.Tweetpi offers a lot of other useful features, such as the ability to follow the same people as other users (which could be a good way of targeting people interested in your products/services).Aside from attracting the user you just followed to be a follower, you may also attract some of the people that follow them.One common thing that users will do to attract retweets is to tweet the names of users they followed recently, such as this:

Which in turn lead to a retweet with more users being exposed to our Twitter account.

Enhancing Your Follows

One thing that some users do to enhance the experience of following is to send a direct message to new followers. Using a tool such as justunfollow, you can automatically send a message whenever you receive a new follower. Be forewarned though: not all people will be receptive to your direct message - so it could lead to some unfollows. This is especially true if your direct message is perceived to be spammy.If you want to automate sending a direct message, you can use a free service like justfollow.

Lead Generation Cards

Lead generation cards are a feature that Twitter created to help businesses get more leads from the social media site. Instead of trying to direct viewers to a landing page to get a lead incentive, they click a button (which in turn gives you the email address from their Twitter card). The card attaches to the bottom of a tweet like this:

When the user clicks the “Download Now” button, they’ll be directed to where they can get the free guide and their email address is sent to you.To create a card, you have to first start a free Twitter Ads account. After getting your account set-up, select Creatives > Cards from the top menu of you Ads account.On the Cards Manager screen you can select whether you want to create a Lead Generation card or a Website card:

• Lead Generation cards are meant to capture the person’s email address so you can contact them as a potential lead
• Website cards tell about your website and are meant to drive more traffic there

After you create your cards, you’ll want to put them to use to start generating leads. To use your Lead Generation cards, log into your Twitter Ads account.

(1) Select Creatives > Cards from the top menu

(2) Select whether the card you want to attach is a Lead Generation or Website one

(3) Place your mouse over the card you want to use, and then click this icon

(4) In the “New Tweet” pop-up box that appears, type your message before the URL of your card

(5) Click the Tweet button

Congratulations, you’ve now created your first Twitter lead generation system!Your new tweet will function like a normal one, except this one will have the picture you uploaded, the headline you wrote, along with the button which will trigger their contact info being sent to you (and direct them to where they can get your lead incentive).[contentblock id=1 img=html.png]