Engaging Users to Grow Social Media Followers with Retweets
By: Elisa Pequini | @lipequini One of the best ways for a company to grow followers is to engage their users into retweeting the company’s tweets. When the followers RT (short for retweet) messages from the company account, the Twitter handle of the company gets exposed to all of the friends/followers of the person who retweeted, who will then follow the company as well. The RT works almost like an endorsement. To make users RT the tweets, just make sure your tweets are important/funny/interesting enough to be retweeted.
A good example of this strategy is the recent promotion from Course PTR Technology (@CoursePTR), a book publisher dedicated to producing high-quality books on innovative topics such as music technology, game development, animation, and graphic design among others.
In order to grow their account, Course PTR launched a Twitter giveaway: users who retweet their tweet automatically enter a drawing to win a copy of The Social Media Business Equation by our very own Eve Mayer Orsburn once the @CoursePTR account reaches 600 followers. The smart thing about this strategy is that, once the goal is set, users who really want that book will RT often so the account will gain 600 followers faster and the drawing will happen sooner.
Contests, drawings, and hot news are all great strategies to help expose your company's Twitter handle to new followers because users are more likely to RT such information.
The flip side to the retweeting coin is, of course, RT-ing other accounts to form relationships. By finding interesting Twitter handles and retweeting content from them to your own followers, you can begin to build relationships through social media. The accounts you RT will then start following you as well and spreading your content to their followers. Relationships are what it is all about, after all.
What does your company do to help grow followers?
You might also like these blogs about social media: