What Are You Tweeting?

It’s sometimes difficult to know what to tweet. All too often, businesses are focused on what they find interesting or want to promote – but this may not be what your followers/customer find interesting.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and think ‘What would I like to know?’

So, how can you determine what your followers are interested in? Well, one way is to review their engagement with your past tweets and see what got the most engagement. Alternatively, be upfront with your followers and ask them what they’d like to see more of; this also opens up conversation with them. If you want to get an idea of what’s worked for you recently, you can review your own Twitter Analytics. You’ll get more info if you do this on a laptop or desktop PC as smartphone analytics are limited. Log in to Twitter and click on your profile photo. From the dropdown menu select ‘Analytics’. This will then give you a range of data for the last 28 days and a few months previous to that.

You’ll have access to No. of Tweets sent, Impressions, profile visits and mentions in addition to Top Tweet, Top Follower, Top Media Tweet and Top Mention. On a smartphone, you can only see analytical data for individual tweets (just click the bar chart icon on the right of any tweet you’ve posted). If you regularly check your analytics, make a note of the data and you can build up a picture of the type of tweet content that get the most engagement and then schedule similarly themed tweets.

As I’ve said in previous articles, always restrain yourself from posting too many ‘hard sell’ tweets; instead, focus on insightful or ‘added value’ tweets – these are tweets that might focus on the benefits of your product/service but not the actual service itself – these could be tips or video demo’s of your product/service’s results. A great example of this type of tweet is local cleaning business Evergreen Clean @evergreennr who regularly post videos of their service in action or before/after photos – this is a great way to ‘soft promote’ your service to your followers.

So, with a bit more insight into what your followers engage with, do you know when’s potentially best to tweet? Well, you don’t necessarily have to rely on complicated algorithms here; common sense plays a part here too. Think about when you check your Twitter feed – this is more likely to be just before work, lunchtime and after work, so see if your engagement level is better during these times – obviously this is targeting individuals – if you’re targeting businesses then possibly the opposite would be true and you need to focus your attention during core working hours.

If you use Google Analytics (GA), your home page will have a section called ‘When do your users visit’ – while this won’t tell you the best time to tweet, it can tell you when the most traffic from social platforms occurs if you compare that with the Acquisition data. Remember though that social publishing isn’t all about driving traffic to your website, so bear that in mind when reviewing the GA data.

So, there’s a few pointers to determine what to tweet and when; it’s not a comprehensive list obviously, but will start to get you thinking about your audience.