Just picture it… Everything you post on Twitter is met by an active community of people who absolutely love what you do. They like your posts, retweet them, reply to you, and even convert when you ask for the sale.
All of that can be a reality once you’ve grown your community with all the right people. We all want to have a loyal, engaged following. However, it’s often easier said than done! Social media is a busy place, making it difficult to stand out. Luckily, I have some tips to help boost your presence when it comes to Twitter.
How to Grow Your Twitter Community:
7 Essential Tips to Follow
If you’re ready to grow your Twitter community, there are seven things you need to know. These tips will help you craft a great profile, offer consistency and value with your content, and more. With these tips in your arsenal, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a pro Twitter user!
1. Make Sure You Optimize Your Profile
First impressions truly make a difference, even on social media. In order to build your community on any platform, you need to make sure you have a complete, optimized profile. That means everything needs to be filled out (and should be updated regularly), plus it needs to make it clear what you have to offer people. Casual visitors of your Twitter profile need to know what you’re all about before they push that “Follow” button!
An optimized profile includes:
- Profile picture
- Header image
- Short and sweet bio
- And a pinned tweet.
On Twitter, you want to choose a great headshot so people can actually see you. (No egg profiles here!) And no, that doesn’t mean you have to hire a professional photographer. If it’s within your budget, go for it! If not, you can easily take some awesome photos of yourself with a tripod or by enlisting the help of a friend. The key here is that people want to see your smiling face. The only exception is if the profile is for a larger company that doesn’t have a single face, in which case a logo is fine.
Next, you want to make sure you’ve added a header image as well. What you choose for your header image is up to you, but it’s important to make sure it effectively represents your brand. At first glance, you can quickly tell visitors what you’re all about.
Take my header image, for example. It includes my title of, “Social Media Power Influencer.” Then, it goes on to let people know I have a blog, a podcast, and that I’m the host of #TwitterSmarter. Simple and to the point!
Your bio is also a key place for showcasing what you’re all about. Through your bio, people can easily determine if you’re the right kind of person for them. They’ll learn what you do and get an idea of the type of content you’ll be posting on your account. And since you don’t have many characters to use when crafting the perfect Twitter bio, it needs to be short, sweet, and to the point. You can also add relevant hashtags to make your profile more discoverable and tag brands when applicable.
And finally, you also want to make sure you’re taking advantage of the pinned tweet. This is valuable real estate on your Twitter profile and can be a powerful way to drive traffic to your site, increase conversions on your offerings, etc. The ideas here are endless! Just make sure you’re thinking about what you’d like new, potential community members to see. What would give them value? What would make them want to follow you?
2. Commit to a Consistent Posting Schedule
In order to stay relevant on social media, you have to be top of mind for your audience. To do that, you should commit to a consistent posting schedule. Otherwise, you could wind up letting days go by before you’ve posted anything… Not good!
This post from CoSchedule actually recommends you post 15 times per day on Twitter. It may seem like a lot, but you have to be active if you want to grow your Twitter community. You’ll want to post throughout the day to hit multiple time zones. Odds are, you have people in your community from all over the world and you want to make sure you’re reaching them when they’re awake and active on Twitter.
3. Focus on Tweeting High-Quality, Valuable Content
To grow your Twitter community, you need to make sure you’re posting content that your audience is actually interested in. If you don’t consider their interests and the types of content they’re searching for, how will you know what to create? You won’t!
Instead, you’ll wind up guessing about what they want to see from you. And in the end, you’ll attract all the wrong people if you even attract anyone at all. That obviously won’t get you the engaged, loyal community you’re trying to build.
Spend time getting to know your audience so you can figure out what they’d want to see from you. You can do this by engaging with them regularly, but also by surveying them if you aren’t sure where to begin. Then, the next step is to deliver what they want!
4. Add Relevant Hashtags to Increase Visibility
When tweeting, you always want to add a hashtag or two to increase the likelihood that you’ll be discovered on the platform. Since Twitter can move pretty quickly, Moz says your tweets only have a lifespan of about 18 minutes. But the good news is… You can reach more people with every tweet you post thanks to hashtags.
Include a relevant hashtag or two to ensure your content is found by the right people. Just don’t go overboard because Buffer says only one or two hashtags will do the trick. According to that post, tweets with hashtags receive 2x more engagement than those without. Tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% higher engagement than those with three or more.
5. Be Present & Engage With Your Audience
Social media is meant to be social. If you aren’t taking the time to actually talk to people, how can you expect to grow your Twitter community? You just can’t! Making new connections and building relationships is crucial to your long-term success as you establish your brand online.
Instead of scheduling a bunch of tweets and walking away for the day, make it a priority to check-in every so often. Take a look at the replies you’re getting and respond to people. It makes your community feel important and like you’re paying attention to them. And you can actively seek out conversations by searching specific keywords or hashtags or by scrolling through the feed of people you follow.
6. Join Twitter Chats to Make New Connections
I may be a bit biased since I do run my own Twitter chat, but I think they’re the best way to grow your Twitter community. In just one chat, you can gain so much exposure and meet people from all around the world who have been brought together because of one common interest. Chats make it easy to open up and form new connections because everyone is there to do the same thing.
If you’re new to Twitter chatting, I have a guide that will help you out. It features tips on being a great Twitter chat participant so you can stand out and form long-lasting relationships.
7. Review Your Analytics Regularly
And finally, if you aren’t actively checking your Twitter analytics, you should be! Your analytics house so much great information that you can use to boost your presence on the platform and grow your Twitter community with people who love what you do.
For instance, you can check out your top tweets to see what performs the best with your audience. This is a good indicator of what they’re interested in and what you should continue posting. If you notice something didn’t perform as well as you’d hoped, you can use it as a learning experience to make tweaks and test it again to see if it performs better.
Call to Action:
- Review your Twitter profile and see where you can make improvements. Is your profile picture recent? Or are you rocking an old hairstyle that’s completely different from what you look like right now? Then, check out your header image, bio, and pinned tweet to make sure they’re clearly communicating what you’re all about and the value you can provide to people.
- Create a consistent posting schedule that you can stick to so you’ll always have tweets being posted. Consider investing in a social media scheduler to help you out if you haven’t already.
- Add a few Twitter chats to your schedule for the upcoming week so you can start making new connections.
- Review your Twitter Analytics and see if you can spot any patterns when it comes to which content performs well and what doesn’t. Use that information to shape your strategy moving forward.