Twitter Twitter continues to grow in importance as a social media platform to drive customer engagement, increase sales opportunities, and expand brand presence. While only 4% of Fortune 500 have a presence on Facebook, 83% of these companies engage with their customers on Twitter. (Business2Community).

Check out our top 3 Pro Tips to increase your audience engagement on Twitter

1.  Engage followers in real time

Twitter gives you direct access to customer feedback and the chance to continuously craft your brand experience in real time. But customer expectations for engagement are high. Each year, users expect a faster response when engaging with social media outlets. According to Search Engine Watch, 70% of Twitter users expect a response when interacting with companies, and 53% prefer a response within 60 minutes of posting. When used for customer complaints, the expectation rises to 72% (eConsultancy).

To help you stay connected with your visitors and provide timely responses, try activating Twitters’ mobile updates to interact with followers using real time notifications through SMS (Twitter).  Or, if your volume of tweets is extremely high, a data scientist can help you strengthen your company’s responsiveness using text analytics to automatically respond to common tweets, and elevate highly sensitive tweets to a call center for a personal touch. Analytics can also alert you to underlying trends to strengthen your offerings – such as ideas to expand products, improve business processes, and more.

2.  View the active consumer as the new influencer

The days of marketing teams building brands by crafting a company’s image behind closed doors are over. Customers now have a say that affects how others will perceive, evaluate and promote (or demote) your brand. (Your Brand is What Your Customers Say It Is)

As the everyday consumer’s voice grows stronger with social media, people are increasingly likely to tweet about their favorite brands (or complain about them) and promote them in their own content. Recent research indicates that consumers interact with an average of 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase. Consumer-created content increases the likelihood that an additional consumer will be attracted to your product. (Huffington Post). So it’s especially important to engage passionate Twitter followers and nurture your relationship with them– they’ll form an important part of your success in gaining even more followers.

3.  Include video content to enhance engagement

Video is a great way to catch the eyes of viewers in the fast moving Twitter stream, increase engagement and grow your audience.  Marketers are using video more than ever in today’s saturated media landscape. It’s everywhere: 73% of marketers will increase the use of video in 2016, and 21% claim it to be the most important form of content marketing. (Business.com).

Consider using video to respond to some tweets, share real time events to drive interaction, promote your offerings, and educate your customers (and potential customers).  Best to keep your videos under 30 seconds. Consider running a contest for users to share their own video with your company and their followers.  (Social Media Examiner)

Strategic use of Twitter will help you stay engaged with and grow your audience. Use these three tips to make the most of the platform, and stay tuned for more to come!

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