The Importance of Tweet Reach to Your Personal Brand

It doesn’t matter if you are offering the best deals in the world on the most coveted products; if nobody has heard of you, no one will do business with you. Those who have something to sell are expected to reach out and find clients, not the other way around. The good news is that the internet has opened up a whole world of opportunities for those trying to give their personal brand some exposure and one of them that you are probably familiar with: Twitter.

Improve your Twitter reach for personal branding

Naturally, using Twitter to increase your Google search rankings is more complicated than simply sending out tweets from time to time; you need to know what to write, how to write it, and even when to publish it. Here is a brief guide which should give you a good idea of how to do all of that.

When to Tweet

To start things off, let’s have a look at when the best time to send out a tweet is. Various statistical analyses have suggested that in comparison to weekdays, Saturday and Sunday have a 17% increase in engagement, while Wednesday and Thursday have the lowest engagement rate. It is estimated that around a fifth of brand tweets are published over the weekend. In other words, if you are looking to increase your personal brand exposure, you would do better to send a tweet on Saturday or Sunday all while avoiding Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Knowing which days to publish your tweets on is not nearly enough; it is important to know precisely which time of day gives the highest engagement rate. As various observations suggest, tweets that are published sometime between 8AM and 7PM have as much as a 30% increase in engagement in comparison to tweets which are published from 7PM to 8AM. It has also been estimated that around 64% of marketers are aware of that and taking advantage of this trend.

How to Tweet

An extremely important aspect of properly reaching out to an audience using Twitter is optimizing the length of your tweets. Even though you are allowed to use as many as 140 characters, it would be much better for you to use less than a hundred characters per tweet. Messages with less than 100 characters receive as much as 17% more engagement than longer ones. You may need to hire a professional ghost writer to do these for you, but rest assured that it will be more than worth it.

Another thing you don’t want to forget to use are hashtags, and for a good reason as it was proven that tweets which use hashtags receive nearly twice as much engagement as tweets that don’t. As of now, it is estimated that around 76% of tweets do not contain hashtags, meaning that only a handful of people who promote personal brands are using them at the moment, leaving a wide opening for you to take advantage of. However, make sure to use one or two hashtags at most, for posts that use more than that see a 17% decrease in engagement.

A very important factor which plays into how popular your tweet is going to be lies in whether or not you ask your followers to either “retweet” or “RT” at the end of your message. As it happens, a tweet’s retweet rate increases about twelve times when the Tweeter asks people to do it. Also, what’s more interesting, only 1% of brands ask their followers to retweet, leaving another huge opening for you to sink your teeth into, especially considering how easy it is to include that little message at the end of all your tweets. Also, if you have enough characters left, ask your followers to “retweet” rather than “RT”. Using the full word increases the retweet rate up to 23 times whereas the abbreviation only increases that rate tenfold.

All in all, as you can see, expanding your personal brand’s exposure with the use of Twitter requires some meticulous planning and adherence to certain strict rules, but with most not  taking advantage of this network as they should, it leaves you plenty of space to try and become a renowned authority in your field through Twitter.

Maria Elena Duron, CEO (chief engagement officer), buzz2bucks | a word of mouth marketing firm, is skilled at making networks “work” and harnessing powerful online and offline buzz, she facilitates online visibility services and word of mouth coaching and workshops – taking companies and professionals from buzz-worthy to bucks-worthy.