At WordStream, we’ve taken a trial-and-error approach to social media. After I took over our accounts about a year ago, we’ve been implementing new strategies, trying out different approaches, and combing through data to see what our audience really likes to engage with.
First, let me tell you: it’s been hard. We post and tweet a LOT. We have a lot to share, what can I say? And obviously social media is part of our overarching marketing efforts, so we want to make sure that not only are we giving our followers what they want to see, we’re also accurately representing WordStream as a company.
[Shameless plug: if you’re interested in our company culture, check out our new Instagram handle: @WordStreamInc!)
Since it’s officially been a full year since I grabbed control of our social accounts (yes, that was me sending you those Facebook messages and Twitter DMs), I thought it was time to reminisce on what we did manage to get right.
Before we get started, I have some tiny tricks-of-the-trade that I use to make sure our tweets get enough eyeballs.
- Post each tweet at least twice, but not more than five times. When people check Twitter, they’re not going to check tweets from two days ago, or even 2 hours ago. Make sure you’re covering your bases; and be creative! Don’t post the same, exact tweet if you can help it, use a variety of headlines.
- If you use social media management software, consider auto-scheduling your tweets. We started doing this and it really helped with engagement—and takes the mind game out of picking a time for each tweet.
- Know your strengths. Look at Twitter analytics to see what day of the week and time of day gets the most interaction from your followers.
- Always post a photo. Bonus points for including emojis, too.
Here are our top-performing tweets from the past year and what you can do to duplicate them for your own social media success!
1. Best Tweets with Company Pride
Though a proud mother doesn’t like to pick favorites…these are my favorites. I love when WordStream hits a big milestone or wins an award and I have the platform to share it with the world!
This post was our best tweet from May 2016, posted right after we won the Best Content Marketing Award from MITX. This tweet garnered 216% more engagement than the next best tweet that month!
How to Replicate this Tweet:
Celebrate the big wins or the small successes. Include a photo of your team celebrating. Tag whoever was involved for maximum exposure.
2. Best Tweets with Gifs
These great tweets celebrated another award and a huge milestone for us as a company—which I tweeted about with some celebratory gifs. Using gifs always seems to lift engagement for us, but these tweets were the best of August and September 2016, by far. Engagement skyrocketed, more than triple the next best tweet of their respective months.
How to Replicate these Tweets:
Gifs are eye-catching, as are numbers (see: “5000”, “$9B”, and “1M”) which probably contributed to our high engagement. Don’t be shy about letting your personality shine through!
Pro Tip: Link these kinds of tweets to a press release or blog post on your site and check out the impact on your site traffic. These tweets are also the perfect candidates for pinned tweets at the top of your profile on Twitter.
3. Best Company Culture Tweets
This category of tweets isn’t surprising—people use social media to connect with their friends. When businesses joined the party, it was a bit of a buzzkill for those of us who were used to seeing friendly faces on our screens. Tweets about our employees, featuring our employees, consistently perform well because it personalizes an otherwise faceless entity in your feed.
This tweet, featuring our Halloween festivities, had 420% more likes than our typical tweets.
How to Replicate These Tweets:
Be that annoying friend who insists on taking a group photo. It goes a long way! For those of you who are like me, and are slightly photographically challenged, take a LOT to edit, crop, filter, and the like. Make sure you tag whoever is in the picture and/or wherever your outing is, throw in some emojis, and call it a grand slam.
Pro Tip: These tweets can be scheduled more than once and auto-scheduled, but I’m a fan of tweeting these in real-time. It’s a little suspicious to tweet about a work event on a Sunday afternoon…
4. Best Tweets with Emojis
Emojis are an easy way to grab someone’s attention, especially on mobile! The best emoji tweets below are a double-whammy; they feature images of our employees AND emojis.
How to Replicate These Tweets:
It can be harder to include emojis when you’re scheduling tweets ahead of time through Buffer or Hootsuite. We like to use GetEmoji for an easy copy-paste. But don’t forget to tweet from your mobile at events, too!
Pro Tip: Use that time of day and time of week data you’ve been collecting, and schedule your tweet to hit that sweet spot. For reference, ours is on Sunday afternoons…
5. Best Tweets with Urgency
We find that increasing urgency generally increases engagement with your content. Using action-inducing words is great for news-based tweets!
How to Replicate These Tweets:
Focus on your headlines. If you are breaking big news or reporting on an important change, add verbiage like “new,” “breaking,” and “get it now” to drive engagement. Create a few different headlines to make the message hit home.
Pro Tip: Expect these types of tweets to get lots of clicks and retweets! Make sure you choose an original image that accurately portrays your brand and relates to the content of the tweet.
6. Best Tweets with Infographics
Here at WordStream, we have a steady flow of content, but there are a few times when we know we’ve really hit the jackpot. In these instances, I’ll throw together a bunch of tweets—more than your average blog post promotion on social—and make sure to slice up an infographic appropriately for the attached image. I’ll also pin one to the top of our Twitter right away. We’ve had a few that really took off – the expanded text ads best practices tweet was our best performing tweet of the year!
This was our best tweet of the year!
How to Replicate these Tweets:
Step one: publish engaging and relevant content with an infographic! If you can’t produce your own infographics, borrow someone else’s (but remember to give them credit!). Next, slice the infographic to choose an eye-catching section to feature in your tweets.
If you’re borrowing an infographic, tag the company it came from—that will absolutely up your engagement when they retweet you. For example, one of our most popular infographics was snagged by for this tweet. He kindly tagged us, which allowed us to retweet him, and we helped each other out with this tweet engagement!
Pro Tip: All the tweets above simply use the title of the post for the copy. Composing an engaging image is half the battle since it will not only draw in your Twitter audience, you’ll get more clicks overall.
7. Best Dark Horse Tweet
I’m going to be honest, when this tweet did well, I was borderline shocked. I had scheduled it days before, thinking we needed a filler for the day but that no one would be checking Twitter on New Year’s Day. I added a gif and signed off to celebrate New Years!
How to Replicate this Tweet:
Follow your gut and stay true to your company’s personality. If you see an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, grab it. Picking well-known gifs doesn’t hurt, either.