Why Twitter Engagement Is Crucial for Brands

[Originally published on the Dash Hudson blog]

While most brands have a presence on Twitter, many are focused on the lower funnel, which tends to be the more reactionary portion of their Twitter audience. While Twitter does lend itself well to customer service, brands that use it solely for responding to requests are ignoring the many upper-funnel customer prospects that their Twitter audience has to offer. Discover why Twitter engagement should be treated less like a text-only reply bot, and more like the visual channel it truly is a place where opportunities abound to turn your followers into buyers.

Visuals Drive Results

With the recent introduction of Fleets into the lexicon, Twitter’s visual path forward is becoming clearer by the day. For brands that have invested in more traditionally visual social channels in the past, Twitter is now an excellent avenue to create a proactive content strategy alongside customer service initiatives. The success of tweets with media attached is evidenced not only by brand experiences, but also by Twitter’s own resources. Tweets with gifs receive 55% more engagement, and tweets with video receive 10X more engagement than tweets without. Brands can now tap into their bank of photos and videos from Instagram and Pinterest to repurpose them for Twitter. Dash Hudson customers love to streamline this process by using the Post Duplicator in our Scheduler to pick and choose which content to send to multiple social channels including Twitter.

From Tweet to Product Page

84.8% of Twitter users made an online purchase in the past month, compared to 74.5% of non-Twitter users. Tapping into the types of tweets that provide the most engagement is the first step towards leveraging the purchasing power of Twitter. The savviest brands use Twitter in earlier stages of the buyer’s journey by providing their followers with content to engage with, and then driving to a product page or the brand’s website. If the majority of your feed consists of replies asking followers to DM their order numbers, most of your audience will quickly feel left out of the conversation, and not be in an engagement and purchase mindset when your account comes across their feed.

Setting Up Your Strategy

So, your brand wants to make this shift, but where to start? The first step is to understand what content your Twitter followers are responding to. Repurposing content from other social channels is an efficient and effective way to keep a consistent brand voice, but you may be surprised by what performs best. What is a winner on Instagram may not be top of the class on your Twitter feed. Digging into your top tweets (and just as important, your bottom tweets) will shed light on what kinds of content are the best to repurpose for Twitter, and what should be left on other channels.

From there, like any other social channel, setting benchmarks and goals for your team is key to understanding where you are now, and where you want to be in the future. A regular cadence on reporting will help track your progress and let you know whether you can stay the course with your current strategy or if you want to make some adjustments. You and your team can easily implement these techniques into your current workflow with Dash Hudson’s Twitter Insights. You’ll have all the information you need, without the noise and clutter that comes along with other Twitter analytics tools.

Your brand is unique, and has a voice that your followers want to hear. It should be represented creatively on all channels including Twitter. It’s the perfect time to level up, and tap into the opportunities that are sitting right there. Your Twitter followers await.

Want to become a DH fam member? Click here to get a demo.

Originally published on December 17, 2020.