Boost Your Reach: Proven Strategies to Outsmart the Twitter Algorithm

If you’re a regular Twitter user, there’s a good chance you like to avoid some of the statistics that float around about engagement.

Like how the average brand engagement rate is only 0.049%, according to one report.

That’s lower than the click-through rate of a banner ad. But despite that, almost half of all marketers see Twitter as the best platform for social engagement.

With rates that low, why do brands use Twitter at all?

The short answer is because it’s still valuable in many ways. And with more than 330 million active users, Twitter as a social platform for brands is alive and well.

But through the years, Twitter has introduced changes to their news feed that have complicated how you should act on their platform.

With engagement rates so low, you have to have more strategy than ever to reap the benefits of this unique platform.

I want to help you navigate the Twitter landscape and find actionable ways to increase your engagement.

To kick things off, let’s dissect the current Twitter news feed and pinpoint exactly what you should be looking for.

Understanding the Twitter algorithm

When Twitter started, everything was shown in reverse chronological order.

That meant as long as you tweeted on a consistent schedule, you could drive engagement by pretty much just showing up at the right time.

But things are different now.

In its current state, Twitter is centered around an algorithm that prioritizes engagement in the form of retweets, conversation, and overall follower count.

According to Twitter’s self-published guide to their algorithm, they use a deep-learning AI that bases a user’s news feed on a variety of factors.

They take everything into account, including the tweet’s author, the content itself, and the activity of the user who might see it.

And to get that engagement, you have to break down how Twitter “scores” each tweet when determining what appears on a user’s news feed.

Your tweet is graded for quality based on who you are and how credible your activity has been in the past.

Twitter’s algorithm also takes into account how much engagement you get in the early life of your tweet. That includes how much time it takes to read through your content and whether or not people are talking about it.

The more positive signals your tweet gets, the better chance you have of engaging with followers and getting retweets.

And when you get more retweets, you create a “ripple effect” of people who are exposed to your brand.

When your follower retweets you, their followers now see your tweet.

If more of their followers retweet, the process continues ad infinitum.

And when you break those retweets and engagements down into your metrics, you’re looking at three major data points:

As indicated in the image above, these data points are:

• Impressions.
• Engagements.
• Engagement Rate.

This gives you a quick breakdown of how many people see your tweet, and how many users actively engage with it by liking, retweeting, or replying.

A “good” impression rate or engagement rate will depend on your own goals and your industry.

Once Twitter’s algorithm gathers all of these data points and metrics, tweets are sorted into one of three categories on the algorithmic timeline.

At the very top of a user’s timeline, they will find the best performing tweets since they last logged on.

This is typically where you see most of the accounts that have huge follower lists. In some ways, this is your ultimate goal.

Then, if it’s been quite a while since their last login, Twitter users will also see the “In case you missed it” section that shows a wider selection of high-performing tweets from the last few days.

Since these are from hours or potentially days ago, this widens the exposure time of your top tweets.

And once they’ve scrolled through the top section, they see the rest of their news feed in reverse chronological order.

So the goal here is to be at the top of the algorithm or to continually place yourself in the reverse chronological feed of your followers.

The better your tweet performs, the higher your chances of staying at the top of the news feed.

And when you’re at the top of the news feed, you’re more likely to get additional retweets.

This, in turn, leads to follower growth and additional opportunities for your brand.

That brings us to one all-important question: How do you create a Twitter strategy that people want to engage with?

To help you answer that question for your brand, I’ve put together seven hacks that have been proven to help other brands increase their follower lists and boost engagement. These will help you beat the Twitter algorithm and grow your digital presence.

And first on the list is an idea that will help you build good posting habits from the start.

Hack #1: Tweet consistently

In late 2018, I ran a test on my Twitter posting habits to see if there was any correlation between how much I posted and how much engagement I got.

The results gave a compelling case that posting consistently is the best place for any brand to start.

During one week, I posted just once per day and gained only 749 visitors from my Twitter traffic for the whole week.

Then the next week, I posted 40 times per day.

Want to know how much more traffic I got? I averaged 5,623 visitors for the whole week when I posted more.

That means there’s one basic, true principle about posting on Twitter for engagement.

You have to post multiple times per day each day if you want to see results. 78% of B2C brands depend on user-generated content, which highlights the fact that more content = more engagement – and Twitter is an easy place to scale your engagement efforts.

And I’m not the only one who’s seen those results.

This incredibly popular infographic from Coschedule recommends that brands post at least 15 times each day on their Twitter account.

They pulled this data from 14 different studies that all recommend posting multiple times per day.

And as you’ll notice, they also recommend posting at all times of day, even when you think no one could possibly be interested.

This helps you potentially engage with every facet of your audience, including potential international followers.

They also recommend you retweet others’ content or share a curated post seven times each day.

You might look at this and think:

And you would be right. No one can maintain a posting schedule like this without the help of social media automation.

That’s why I recommend looking into a service like Agorapulse to help take the stress out of establishing a steady posting schedule.

Their platform makes it easy to create and preview your post before you post it.

Then you can opt to schedule your tweet once or multiple times.

This will allow you to quickly schedule your posts and create a more hands-off approach to your growth.

One brand even reported that it saved them hours of time when trying to schedule their Twitter posts.

Just make sure that you’re not using a strategy that Twitter considers spam, as recent updates have sought to penalize brands that frequently publish repeat content across multiple accounts.

As long as you create and share unique, well-written content on your Twitter account, you’ll be able to take advantage of increased engagement.

Hack #2: Consider Twitter ads

When trying to build up your followers on Twitter, it’s easy to get discouraged when you don’t see fast results.

While it’s generally never advisable to look for fast results on any digital marketing effort, paying for strategic advertisements could provide a shorter path to success.

And Twitter ads have seen some pretty impressive successes over the years.

For example, watch brand MVMT used Twitter ads in an effort that ultimately boosted their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales by 353% over their daily average.

So while success will vary from brand to brand, using Twitter ads to boost engagement can yield some wildly positive results.

When you dig a little deeper into Twitter’s advertising platform, you’ll find that there are actually three different ways you can “pay-to-play” on Twitter:

The first option is by far what most users will notice, as it shows up directly in their feed in the form of a promoted tweet.

This particular promoted tweet was on my feed recently, even though it’s four months old at least:

This has the immediate benefit of extending the lifespan of your highest performing posts.

Plus, I don’t follow this particular brand, which means they’re tapping into more than just their follower list for engagement.

If you get a lot of traffic off of a particular post, you can pay to promote it instead of simply reposting it at another time.

You’re guaranteed to show up in the news feeds of both your followers and users who don’t follow you.

And since you don’t lose your retweet or like count, you’ve got a healthy amount of social proof that encourages others to engage with your post as well.

The second option available to you is a promoted account, which is a little more subtle and more oriented toward building your follower list.

As you can see, this is encouraging me to follow an account based on other on-site behaviors.

At the very top of the list is a promoted account that’s aiming to win a follower.

If this brand weren’t promoting the account, there’s a good chance they’d be much further down the list.

And finally, you can also create a promoted trend to help boost conversation around your brand:

This lets you pay to include your hashtag in the Trends box that every user sees on their Twitter news feed:

This is the shortlist of what Twitter users are actually talking about at any given time. By including your brand on this list, Twitter is placing you with other talked-about topics and brands.

And when used properly, it can let you steal the show like Huawei did when they promoted a trend in the run-up to the GSMA Mobile Conference.

With more than 11 million impressions, their trend netted them 231,000 viewers for their live broadcast at the conference.

However you choose to use Twitter’s advertising platform, the results can help you gain new followers and show off your brand like never before.

Just make sure that you’re creating fresh content, according to advice from Wordstream CEO Larry Kim.

When he simply reposted old content, he noticed that engagement levels dropped significantly over the next few days.

That means it’s probably a better idea to promote your freshest content.

You’ll get more engagement and start better conversations when it looks like your content is fresher.

He also recommends being as specific as possible with any targeting you choose to employ.

The more attuned your potential audience is to your brand, the higher your chances are of actually engaging.

At the end of the day, promoting your brand with Twitter advertising can help you hack the algorithm and keep your brand in front of thousands of new users on a daily basis.

Hack #3: Don’t just imitate another successful brand

There’s no shortage of Twitter brands that have strong personalities.

For example, the Moon Pie account is well known for tongue-in-cheek posts and borderline snarky comebacks that have made them Internet famous.

Here are some of their more recent, tamer posts:

While it might be tempting to imitate some of the successful brands that have employed these less traditional tactics, that might not be a good idea.

A recent study by SproutSocial has shown beyond any doubt that these brands are largely the outliers.

Only one-third of consumers want to see a brand that’s snarky with their audience.

While it’s certainly possible to tap into that niche and see success, why would you purposefully limit your audience like that?

With 53% of Twitter users expecting a brand to reply within one hour, present your brand as quick, honest, friendly, and helpful. By doing so you’ll be in a much better position to increase your engagement.

One brand was able to quickly gain over 400 unique leads by transitioning their brand message to a positive and nurturing tone.

Your goal is to connect with people. That means genuine conversation from a genuine brand. So instead of snark, reply with positivity and sincerity like this example shown by Starbucks:

Users will want to talk to you on Twitter if they’re not afraid of having their head bitten off.

If people are afraid to raise concerns or talk, then you’re failing to provide the best user experience possible. Find your brand’s unique tone and writing style, and don’t waver from it.