A recent study on major brand activity on Twitter, reveals primary factors that influence engagement on Twitter. The study, by social media monitor Track Social, found for example, that photo tweets do much better than regular Tweets, although in the study, just 2.3 per cent of all Tweets are photo tweets.

Twitter engagement by post type

Source: Track Social

Morgan Arnold, CEO of Track Social, points out that there are reasons why pictures aren’t always appropriate: “It should be noted that certain corporate use cases on Twitter, such as customer service, don’t lend themselves to the use of images, and indeed that the platform itself was founded on the use of text. However, it still seems that there is significant opportunity for brands to increase their engagement levels through the use of images.”

Twitter engagement by message text

Source: Track Social

In terms of the content of the tweet, one simple way to drive up the number of retweets is to ask for them. Asking for a retweet produces an astounding 555 per cent lift over the average tweet. Hash tags are also important for increasing exposure and response rates. But surprisingly, tweets than openly referenced offers or coupons performed somewhat worse than average.

When it comes to how often a brand should tweet, the answer is once a day is not enough. When a brand tweets two to five times a day it gets more retweets by tweet, by up to 300 per cent, compared with tweeting just once a day. Discussing the ideal ways brands should use Twitter, Arnold says: “The Twitter audience is quite open to a high volume of tweets. In fact, it can be difficult for brands to maintain visibility without a certain level of activity. For PR, this means that the best engagement strategy is a regular programme of ongoing tweets spread throughout the day. With monitoring you can continue to increase the frequency significantly up to 10 or more tweets per day.

Retweets by Tweet frequency

Source: Track Social

“Of course, you have to keep it relevant. Look for ways to connect with the Twitter users, popular culture, news or events and give people something to be excited about … even if only for a few seconds.”

Arnold concludes that Twitter’s potential as a PR machine is second to no other integrated social platform: “This is because Twitter was designed as a platform for seamless sharing and high-volume messaging. It works extremely well for brands and products that naturally generate ongoing content and that are ‘buzz-worthy‘.”

Background
 

Track Social studied 100 brands and in total 50,321 tweets were analysed. The time period of the study was from 24 August to 28 September 2012. See here for more details.