6 simple quick wins for building your Twitter engagement

Welcome to another edition of PROse, the B2B marketer's no BS guide to creating standout content.

Another Thursday, another flight to catch. This time, headed to DC (with no layover! 🙌🏾).

P.S. is it just me, or is anyone else cramming in trips before the weather gets too cold??

Anyway, I promised you a list of quick wins to get your Twitter engagement jumping, so let’s get to it.

Every digital marketing discipline has a guru sharing a list of low-hanging fruit to get some quick wins.

Then I realized… no one writes these for organic social.

Well, not anymore.

I put together a checklist of 6 things I do every time I take over a new Twitter account.

In fact, here’s the stats for one of the brands I started working with at the beginning of September.

That’s to say… this stuff works.

1. Clean up your bio

A lot of brands have sales-y or vague bios.

This doesn’t make people want to follow you. And it definitely doesn’t help potential customers understand what you’re about.

Your bio should answer these questions:

• What your company does

• Why people should follow you

Triple Whale has a pretty clean bio - and they even include a screenshot of the product in the header to make it crystal clear what they do.

Now, you don’t always have to spell out a literal reason for people to follow your brand. If you do a good enough job explaining what you do, your target audience should gravitate towards you.

But in the cases where you do something unique in your niche, you should highlight it.

Fast (RIP) highlighted their giveaways as a reason for people to follow them.

Either way, make sure when people click on your profile, they know what they’re getting themselves into.

2. Insert links with UTMs

This doesn’t directly impact your engagement, but it does help.

Twitter’s click data is wack, and sometimes straight up inaccurate.

So creating your own external links with UTM parameters makes it easy to track what content is moving people down the funnel (or at least off the platform + into deeper research).

Use that data to create more of the same sort of content.

3. Build a Twitter List to engage with your target audience

This is the secret weapon.

If you don’t have a ton of followers or engagement, you need to be doing hand-to-hand combat.

But not just with any account, we’re going to choose your sparring partners strategically.

Anytime I take over a brand’s Twitter account, I create a private list of people with large audiences in that niche.

I’m “fortunate” to be Very Online, so I have broad knowledge of the players in most tech niches.

But if you only know a 1-2 people in your niche with a large account, here’s you can do:

• Go to their profile

• Check their replies, retweets and likes for other accounts in your niche with 5k+ followers

• Add them to your list until you get 10 people on the list

• Add more people as you discover new accounts over time

Once you’ve assembled your list, it’s time to get to work.

Block 30 mins/day (two 15-min sessions) to engage with accounts on your list.

Leave insightful or funny comments, gifs, shout them out in the other accounts’ replies (when relevant).

The goal is to get noticed and some new eyes on your account without becoming a “reply guy”.

It’s a dance though. Don’t feel the need to jump under every tweet - only when it makes sense for your brand account to hop in the conversation.

I did this once at a previous job and we had partners and customers writing to our team about how funny it was. We even had other people parodying it and tagging us.

These are the sort of moments you’re looking for.

4. Remix old content

There are two types of content worth remixing:

• Content from 3+ months ago that blew up

• Content from 1+ month ago that was fire but didn’t get enough love

I’ve had plenty of moments where I posted decent content that got little to no love. But when I went back to repost (sometimes I’d make a small tweak), it got 2, 3, 4x the engagement as before.

So if you know you had a banger that didn’t get fair treatment, don’t be afraid to give another shot.

Also, feel free to use content that already blew up in the past - whatever you consider “blew up” to be for your account.

The benefit is that you already proved the concept to be a winner. Now all you have to do is find a new angle to share the same thing.

Had a tweet that took off? Parody it into a meme.

Had a poll that got a lot of responses? Turn it into a text-based question and add “wrong answers only” at the end.

There are tons of ways to turn old content into something new - and using humor to do it will get you really far.

5. Make memes

Speaking of memes…

Make more of them.

If you have the bandwidth, try to make half of your daily content output memes.

The key is to:

• Know your audience’s language

• Know what their biggest pains are

• Make a joke of those pains - using their language

Most of the time, I use imgflip.com to find good meme formats. It doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, be a very heavy lift at first. You’re just putting shots on the basket to see what sticks.

Over time, you’ll start to learn all the little nuances.

6. Post questions

No one can resist a good question - or even better, a spicy question.

But don’t overthink it.

For this to do well, you need to know your audience, but honestly the silliest things get people popping off.

This brand normally averages 1-2 replies on tweets, so this was a nice uptick.

Andddd, that’s all folks! Your 6-point checklist for lifting engagement on Twitter:

1. Clean up your bio

2. Use links with UTMs

3. Build a Twitter List and engage

4. Remix old content that did well or not

5. Make more memes

6. Post questions

If you enjoyed this, I’d love it if you forwarded to another B2B marketer you think would enjoy it.

See you next Thursday! ✌🏾