Increasing Twitter community engagement and number of followers are key tasks for digital marketing professionals. To help digital marketers boost Twitter community engagement and number of followers, I’ve provided five Twitter marketing techniques that are effective:

1. Monitor relevant hashtags

   Monitoring relevant hashtags helps you discover prospective clients. For example, if you’re a restaurant, monitoring hashtags #foodie and #foodporn lets you find consumers who enjoy dining and would likely be interested in trying your dishes. Once you’ve identified these individuals, interact with them and encourage them to follow your Twitter account and visit your restaurant.
   
   An easy way to assess relevant hashtags is by using Tagboard. Tagboard is a hashtag monitoring tool which generates a list of relevant hashtags based on your query. Learn more about Tagboard at How We Improved Our Social Media Performance with These 3 Tools.
   
   

   

2. Monitor conversations that contain specific keywords

   Monitoring conversations that include targeted keywords lets you find opportunities to engage with Twitter users and encourage them to follow your account. In addition, it helps you identify areas where you can improve your products or services.
   
   For example, if you’re a food manufacturer, monitoring tweets that contain a competing brand’s name lets you see what prospective clients are saying about the competing brand. If consumers tweet that they love a service the competitor offers, you can integrate it in your service strategy. If consumers show that they’re displeased with a service attribute, tweet about the service options you provide that fit their needs.
   
   Two effective tools to monitor specific keywords are Topsy and Social Mention. Using these tools lets you generate tweets that contain targeted keywords. 
   
   

   

3. Retweet content shared by prospects

   Retweeting content shared by prospects helps you gain exposure in front of prospective clients and enter their evoke sets.
   
   An evoke set is a group of relevant brands that a prospective consumer is favorably familiar with when they are thinking about making a purchase. The goal of many marketing campaigns is to establish their business brand firmly among the evoked set of products considered by most target consumers when making a purchase decision.
   
   For example, if you’re a headhunting agency for marketing companies, retweeting content shared by local marketing companies helps you gain exposure in front of these companies so that they’ll be more likely to consider your services when they need recruiting services in the future.

4. Unfollow people

   A healthy following to follower ratio is vital to maintaining a reputable brand image. A poor following to follower ratio (i.e. 3:1) suggests that you aren’t a trustworthy, credible brand and that’s why fewer people follow you than the number of people you follow. A healthy ratio (i.e. 1:3) suggests that you’re a reputable brand and many consumers want to stay up-to-date with your product and company news.
   
   Use Unfollowers.me to unfollow users. Unfollowers.me is a social media tool which displays users that you’re following but aren’t following you back so that you can either interact with them and encourage them to follow you or unfollow them to maintain a healthy ratio.

5. Follow prospects

   Following prospective clients increases your chance of gaining new followers and converting sales.
   
   For example, if you’re an online retailer, following fashionistas helps you attract your target audience and push your products to them when appropriate.
   To discover and follow potential customers, use Followerwonk. Followerwonk is a follower segmentation tool which lets you find suitable users based on their bios, geographic location, number of followers, and URL.
   
   If you’re a Vancouver online retailer, you can use Followerwonk to identify users who live in Vancouver, New York, or Toronto who mention fashion, shopaholic, or shopping in their bios. 
   
   

   

   If you have any questions about social media marketing, please contact us directly or attend our 1-day P.A.C.E. Digital Marketing Training Workshop to learn more about social media for business.