Congratulations on your engagement!

Becoming (and remaining) engaged with your audience is a tricky endeavour, but it’s one of the most important things to be aware of when it comes to your social media activity. 

Here we’ll give you some tips on how to build up an audience and connect with your followers. Although much of this relates to Twitter, a lot of this information and advice can still be applied to other social platforms. 

Before getting into the technical stuff like algorithms and strategy, we should mention the more creative side of user engagement first. Ask yourself: “Does my brand have a voice and is it consistent?” If your answer is ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ then carry on. 

If not, then it would be useful to decide how you want your brand to come across. What’s the message you want to send? Are you professional above all else? Are you relatable and amiable? Are you more jovial and offbeat in your approach?

The good news is that you can be anything you want. It’s exciting when you think about it. 

Getting back to consistency however, this voice needs to come across each and every time someone on your team posts or responds or creates just about anything to put out to the public. No matter what member of your team has logged into your Twitter profile today, they need to come across in the exact same way you or anyone else on your team might. 

If that’s all a given then let’s carry on to the more technical stuff!

So, Twitter’s algorithm has a few conditions for you to follow in order for you to increase your reach.

• If a tweet is doing well in your network then you are sure to end up seeing it and that’s why you want to create content that people are more likely to engage with. Not only that, if people engage quite quickly after it's posted then it will be visible for a longer time (depending on the level of engagement it could last for days). 

• The more people you talk to, the more reach you have. Though, you don’t always have to talk to people for engagement to take effect, just having people read your posts counts too.

• Remember, if there are people in your network that you have engaged with before then they will appear at the top of your feed. 

• Also, don’t forget, analytics are your friend. Utilising them properly, you’re able to see all the information you’ll need to inform when to post and who your posts appeal to. This information can be invaluable when it comes to making plans for posting in the future and scheduling them accordingly. 

• It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on who is responding to you. If someone replies to you, engage with them and reply back. If you can reply promptly, even better still. Being proactive is important.