Chances are if you’re reading this, you haven’t heard a tweet in quite a while. Don’t worry, the birds are still out there, you just have to know how to attract their attention. Now, if your audience were actually birds, bread would do the trick. Alas, your audience aren’t birds, and require a bit more than crusty old bread to entice them. The following tips are aimed at increasing your Twitter engagement.

1: Local Hashtags

This is amongst the most simple things you can do to drive local engagement. The use of a local hashtag makes your tweets easily searchable,  and will reach out to your most immediate audience. Here, at Mobloggy, a great local hashtag is #Vail, or #VailVillage. These two hashtags are close in similarity but there are clear advantages to using one over the other. #Vail is a larger and more common hashtag, meaning it will have more people using that tag and engaging with it. That’s great if you are looking to target a larger audience, but your tweet may get lost in the white noise of Twitter. On the other-hand, #VailVillage is a very local tag and won’t be quickly bypassed in the rapidly changing news stream. It’s better to use this to reach your immediate cliental and community.

This isn’t to say one is better than the other, it’s just showcasing the difference between the two. If you wish you can even use the two in conjunction. This however, is not recommended as it will take up many of your coveted 140 characters. To effectively tweet try limit your tweet to 100 characters. This will allow people to retweet you, with ample space to leave a comment or reply.

2: Retweet

Here’s a great way to interact with your community without seeming pushy or overtly advertising. By searching hashtags, and the lifestyle your brand is trying to establish, you can find great content to share with your now growing audience. Be careful not share your competitions content, as you don’t want to take customers away from you. Instead, try to find user generated content, something thats eye catchy and attractive. By retweeting this not only do you get your name out there, but you’re connecting on a deeper level with that specific individual. This also introduces your to their personal news stream, if they reply to your retweet. You’ve now shown interest in them, and you can hope that they will do the same.

3: RiteTag

This is my favorite simple Twitter trick. RiteTag is a browser extension that  allows you to see how often a certain hashtag is being used. Overused tags (red) you typically want to avoid. They gather the most attraction, but due to that your tweets can easily be overlooked.  The green tags are going to be your best friends. They reach a wide audience, aren’t used too much and are easily searchable. Using RiteTag allows you to quickly and easily determine which hashtags are most appropriate for specific tweets. You can find RiteTag in most web stores.

4:Link Social Media Accounts

An easy and crucial point in driving Twitter engagement. By linking your other accounts to Twitter, you can have automatic tweets sent out from different social media sites. If you’re publishing awesome content have it send out to twitter at the same time. It’s an effective way to reach 2 audiences at the same time. You can also do this with Instagram, which works very well with Twitter.

When pushing content from Facebook to Twitter (or any social media site) try to keep your text short and sweet. People have short attention spans, and your content can be easily overlooked if it is too wordy. Keeping it short also has the added benefit of the entire post being published on Twitter. Remember, Twitter only has 140 characters so try to be concise and effective. As stated before, it’s good to leave ample room to allow people to comment or reply to your tweets.

5: Use Mobloggy!

All of us here are passionate about social media, the internet, technology… well, we’re nerds. Remember back in high school when people would copy off the smart nerdy kid, right before first period started? We’re that nerdy kid, and while we won’t let you copy our homework, we’d be glad to help you with yours! If you’re interested in what we can do for you feel free to drop us a line.