Activating Your Audience On Twitter

Posted on Wednesday 10th September, 2014

Author: Alice Roughton

Twitter – Activating Your Audience

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world.

With over 255 million monthly users, it comes as no surprise that more and more brands and businesses are using Twitter to encourage people to take action.

Whether you want to grow your own network through retweets, favourites and followers, encourage conversations about new products and services, drive web traffic, or acquire new customers, one thing is for sure – if you want to be seen (and heard!) by the right people, then your 140 character message must be clear and engaging.

To help Social Media professionals encourage greater interaction and reaction to what it calls ‘direct response tweets’ (or, tweets which prompt followers to take a desired action), Twitter has released the following information on the most engaging format as part of it’s #TwitterAcademy series.

The anatomy of a direct response tweet should be as follows:

Question – Grab your audience’s attention, and prompt them to think about a chosen subject or challenge.

Offer A Solution - Show how your brand or business can solve that problem or question.

Call to action – Make your call to action clear.

Link – Provide a link easy for users to take advantage of your deal, offer, service or products.

Remember, you only have 140 characters to play with, so it is essential that you make every character count. Think carefully about what you’re saying. Play around with your message or run it by a colleague to make sure it is as relevant and compelling as possible.

Where possible, avoid using @ or #. It sounds counterintuitive (after all, it is hard to remember what the # symbol was even used for pre-Twitter!) but these features can distract people from taking action by clicking your link.