How Should You Maximize Engagement on Twitter?

This was the subject of another study my company did recently on Twitter Engagement. This particular study focused on what factors within your Twitter content cause increases in retweets and favorites. By far the most significant factor was the use of images on your Tweet.

Summary

Will this fundamentally alter the digital landscape? No, but it does mean that a strong presence on Twitter will have more value than it did before. To capitalize on this shift, do the following:

1. Increase your time invested in Twitter.
2. Create engaging content that people will want to retweet and favorite.
3. Build relationships with others who will help amplify your content.
4. Make sure to build relationships with influencers whose tweets are more likely to get indexed by Google.
5. Watch the indexation of your tweets grow while you build your own influence on the platform.

As the full partnership takes effect, we may discover other ways to optimize our Twitter strategies for search, but until then, preparing for the shift using the steps above is a wise move.

Here you can see that your chances of getting at least one retweet are more than doubled for most low and moderate social authority accounts. That's quite a significant difference. Our data also showed that you can also get five to nine times as many total retweets by including images. That's a big deal!

Other factors that matter, though not quite as much as images, were the use of hashtags and implementing longer tweets. Factors that mattered less were time of day, including links to content off of Twitter, or mentions of others.

While the above info can definitely help you optimize your own presence, you can't forget the importance of developing relationships on Twitter. Focusing on key friendships and relationships with influencers is a big key to success, especially if your presence on the platform is not currently that strong. 

Imagine someone with a highly influential account retweeting your most important content. This could be gold for you, as it can make Google aware of the content very quickly. The influencer's tweet with the link to your content may appear in search results and help expose it to much wider audiences. Of course, this may also result in more links to your content as well.

Even if Google does not get information in the Twitter data feed that allows it to understand who is retweeting whom, Google could still use link data to better understand whose profiles are most important. Then, they can place more value on their tweets, and place them within their index, driving traffic and exposure to that tweet. If it contains a link to your content, your traffic and exposure could go up.