Since its inception in 2006, Twitter has probably been one of the most buzz inducing social media platforms out there. The reason why Twitter is so different from other platforms like Facebook and Instagram is because of how the global audience views information they see on Twitter.
While Facebook and IG are seen somewhat as communication and entertainment mediums, conversations on Twitter are likely to go viral and be trusted by more people.
Therefore, having a large presence and maintaining relevance on Twitter carries massive potential for growing brands, businesses and accounts. But creating this presence and maintaining consistent engagement or impressions becomes difficult due to how highly saturated the marketplace is.
Twitter’s 450 million monthly active users follow an average of 707 accounts. This makes vying for their attention and impression a difficult task.
But even if you have a significant following, you are almost sure to often face phases where you just can not seem to get the conversion you desire. This is because at the end of the day, growth on Twitter is all about showing up in people’s feeds.
Do not worry if you are not getting your desired CTR (ClickThrough Rate) or conversion out of the platform, because this article is all about that. We’ll tell you how to increase twitter impressions.
Keep reading to find out more about what impressions are, what they can do for you and how increasing Twitter impressions can help your business boom:
What Are Twitter Impressions & Why Are They So Crucial to Your Marketing Strategy?
Marketers and social media analysts alike use impressions as a factor for measuring a brand or an account’s presence on Twitter. At its very basics, Twitter impressions refer to the number of times a tweet or your profile in general shows up in people's feeds.
This means it measures how many times people are likely to see your post, thereby affecting engagement and becoming an important factor in measuring engagement rates. Twitter impressions are also alternatively used as a synonym for reach, as both of these terms refer to the number of people your tweet can reach.
Now a lot of people tend to believe that your Tweet’s reach is limited to the number of followers you have, and they could not be more wrong. Twitter’s algorithm highlights posts that are performing well or are relevant to people’s interests.
This means, Twitter impressions can be used as a factor to measure how good your post is, how much value it provides to your target audience and how well your digital marketing strategy is working.
Tweets with higher impressions also have more potential to be retweeted, liked and commented on. This means more impressions increase the potential engagements your Twitter accounts could get, and it in turn gets you more conversions from the platform. You can use Twitter impressions as a metric and a tool therefore, to analyze, change and tweak your digital marketing strategy.
Twitter Impressions Vs. Potential Reach
Alright, I know we already said that Twitter impressions and reach are often terms that are used interchangeably. However, the term reach stands for something quite different. While impressions are a solid indicator as to how many people have seen your post or how many times it showed up on people’s profiles, reach is much more ambiguous and measures the potential number of impressions.
Whereas impression is a solid number of people who have already definitely seen your post, reach calculates how many people could have seen it. Reach is calculated by adding the number of followers you have on your profile to the number of profiles following any account that retweets your initial tweet.
Thus, it is quite evident that impressions measure the performance of an individual post while reach measures the potential of performance of that same post.
How Twitter Impressions & Engagement Rate Interact
If you have ever talked to anyone who has seen any amount of success on any social media platform, they will tell you that engagement is absolutely key. While Twitter impressions calculate the number of people who have seen your post, engagement measures the number of people who either liked, commented or retweeted that post.
So the connection is obvious right? The higher the number of impressions you have, the more engagement you can get on your post. The basic engagement rate calculation formula looks something like this:
[Likes count + Retweet count + Reply count + Clickthrough count] / [ Number of followers] [Number of posts]
As you can see, getting your post more engagements by increasing the number of impressions can significantly increase your engagement rate. This makes your digital marketing strategy’s performance significantly better. Increasing the number of impressions on your profile also means marketing your posts to a global audience, thereby increasing global engagement and allowing you to get the highest ratio possible.
You’ll also like: How to Get More Followers on Twitter
10 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Impressions
Discover Your Audience and the Aim of the Game
The first step to creating the best social media marketing strategy for your profile is understanding who your audience is and what they want. Ask yourself the following questions:
Do you understand your target audience? What do they want to see on Twitter? Is my current social media marketing strategy giving them what they want?”
First, decide or figure out who you primarily want to market your business to. Then, go to Twitter analytics or use other analytics tools to figure out their engagement trends. This will give you a good idea as to what your audience wants to see and help you figure out your marketing strategy.
Then, figure out what you want to achieve via maintaining a presence on Twitter. Once you have that sorted, figure out if catering to your target audience will allow you to reach those goals. This will help you understand the kind of value you should provide to your followers and allow you to reorganize your tweeting strategy according to it. This reorganization will also allow you to be retweeted more often and thereby build impressions beyond your followers.
Keep Your Tweets Relevant
With hectic tweeting schedules and the increasing competition to stay relevant on people’s feeds, one of the things businesses struggle with is staying on track and relevant with their tweeting strategy. As you post more and more content that does not resonate with your brand message, the less likely you are to build social proof and brand reputation.
People also have the tendency to write off Tweets from accounts that often post irrelevant content. Therefore, it is essential to your digital marketing strategy to stay relevant and on message. This relevancy will also allow you to show up in people’s feeds more often by increasing your chances of getting on Twitter’s trending page.
Tweet When Your Audience is Active, Mostly
As much as your tweeting relevance and content quality matters, the times at which you tweet also significantly affect your impression amount and engagements. There are up and down hours of Twitter activity and you need to figure out when your target audience stays online the most.
While this changes from industry to industry and from account to account, the best time to post to get the most impression is one of two peak hours- during the morning at around 8:30 to am or in the evening from 6 to 10 pm.
Add More Visual Like Videos, Images, and Gifs
Twitter limits its users to around 280 characters per tweet. This makes it difficult for marketers to get their message through and thereby makes it significantly more difficult to build new impressions. To combat this, social media specialists will often revert to posting high volumes of visual content (images, gifs and videos).
This is because posts with visuals are 3 times more likely to get noticed when compared to static posts, thereby increasing engagements. And this engagement in turn gets you more impressions in the form of retweets.
Visual content also however, has a specific limit to which it is attractive. Keep your gifs and images truly visual and add as little text as possible. This makes the post itself look more appealing and encourages people to share it more because of how calming or interesting the aesthetics are. Videos on the other hand, should remain below 30 seconds long since that is how long the effective attention span is.
Ask More Questions to Get Responses
Now, the first step to getting noticed more on Twitter is to make sure that people respond to your content more. To get more responses the tip is to keep asking more questions. Polls on Twitter and the direct engagement tools are underrated tools of engagement.
Create polls to ask your followers about what they are interested in and what they expect from your business. This allows you to build a strong understanding of your audience while also increasing your engagements, and in turn your impressions.
Be Consistent in a Variety of Tweeting Rich Content
A buzz word social marketing or Twitter experts often use is the term ‘high value content’. High value content is not just relevant to your audience, but is also rich enough to encourage them to engage and retweet.
Consistently being diverse yet rich in your tweeting strategy will allow you to create a reputation of authenticity and ingenuity. This will drive your account growth rates forward and increase your CTR and in general, your impressions.
Maintain the Right Tweeting Schedule
One of the major woes that account holders often face while aiming for account growth is finding the right tweeting consistency and schedule. Both over posting and underposting are real problems and can have massive impacts on your potential growth.
Once you have the right quality of content figured out for your Twitter account, try to be consistent and smart with your tweeting schedule. Tweet too often, and your account will come off as spammy.
Tweet too little, and you will lose relevance in your follower’s feeds. Either way, try to tweet on a regular basis (about 4 to 6 times a week) but remain relevant and fill in the gap time by sharing relevant content.
Keep Engaging With Followers, Influencers, and Brands
To stay on top of your Twitter game, it is important to retweet content from your followers and other relevant influencers and brands. This creates a cycle where relevant accounts are likelier to retweet your posts, thereby increasing the potential number of impressions your tweets can get. On the other hand, collaborating with influencers and brands creates a channel for you to grow into their follower base.
Reply to Comments on Your Posts
So this bit is super important. You will never keep growing your impressions or engagements if people from your older impression base do not stay relevant or keep engaging with your post. To ensure this, give them incentives to keep commenting on your posts. Responding to their comments will not work as a form of two way engagement, but also motivate them to come back and see your next post. Make them feel like they are a part of the conversation and an important part of your marketing strategy.
Utilize Effective Hashtags
As we have already discussed before, the number of impressions your posts get reaches far beyond your existing follower base. This is because there are various ways for people to discover your posts.
One of these ways is via hashtags. Just like Instagram, hashtags have become an instrumental part of Twitter posting and adding hashtags to posts is almost as expected. Tweets that use hashtags are 10 times likelier to get noticed an engaged with, making proper utilization of relevant hashtags an important and effective Twitter marketing tool.
How Are Twitter Impressions Calculated?
By this point, you should already be somewhat familiar with the Twitter analytics tools and their potential for changing and reorganizing your tweeting strategy. To find out more about your Twitter impressions, first access your analytics dashboard.
This dashboard also contains information that can help you track activity and performance on the platform based on posts or time. On this dashboard, you will find information that is segmented based on organic and promoted data.
The number of impressions you have are shown based on what was achieved organically through the quality of your post and followers and based on how many impressions were created via promotion.
And while the Twitter analytics tool is effective, it is also seemingly basic. Social media analytics tools like Tweetreach, Twitonomy and Keyhole will allow you to have a better understanding of your post's performance while also suggesting you the best practices to climb out of your particular situation.
How Does Engagement Rate Affect Your Twitter Impressions?
In essence, engagement rates and impressions are directly dependent on each other. Both of these factors are essentially key performance indicators which track how well your digital marketing strategy is working. Therefore, one of them increasing would definitely boost the other’s chances.
The more engagement rate you have on a specific post, the more likely it is to be read as a valuable post by Twitter’s algorithm. In essence, having more engagements indicates that your post is of high quality and this tricks the Twitter algorithm into placing you higher on people’s feeds, thereby increasing your impression numbers.
How Many Impressions Are Considered ‘Good’ on Twitter?
As for good impression rates for any published content, a tweet having around 20 to 25% organic impression numbers compared to your followers can be considered as successful. If you are launching a hashtag campaign however, you should target at least 100,000 impressions if you are an SME.
If you are falling behind on your impression goals, it might be because you do not have enough active followers to make a substantial dent.
To get an instant follower boost and increase your account’s Twitter impressions, SocialPlug’s USA Twitter Follower Service can be really effective.
You could also buy highly engaging Twitter accounts with an existing follower base from different websites. To know more about the best places to buy accounts, check this out!
Twitter Analytics Impressions Vs. Engagement
To find impression numbers in Twitter analytics, you will need to download an extended Twitter report from the analytics tab. You can also find this information directly under the tweets section. Here, you can create a time column to separate engagement data by time of day.
To find engagement rates however, you will need the following data:
- Cumulative number of favorites or likes on recent tweets
- Cumulative number of retweets or reshares on recent tweets
- Total number of replies to recent tweets
- Clicks on attached links on posts or on the link on the bio
- Number of impressions per tweet
- Number of tweets considered as the sample size
How to Track Twitter Impressions With an Analytics Tool
Depending on tweets or the type of analytics tool you are using, impressions will be separated based on time of day directly within the home page of the software. It also tracks other data like reach, engagement and performance indications.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my private twitter account have impressions?
All posts made on Twitter have impression statistics since this tracks how many of your followers are seeing your posts.
What is the best time to tweet?
We have already discussed this earlier. From 8:30 to 10:30 am or from 6 to 10 pm
How do I check my impressions on Twitter?
Impressions and other performance statistics can be found using the Twitter analytics tool or a 3rd party app.
