I rarely get engagement on Twitter. What am I doing wrong?

Originally answered on Quora

Are you engaging back?

Ask yourself that question for a moment. What are you giving to Twitter?

Seems a back to front way of thinking about it, doesn’t it?

But instead of focusing on the content of your tweets, let's look at the bigger picture here.

You want engagement

Likes, retweets. People to start commenting on your stuff. You want to be part of the community.

But to do that, you’ve first got to join the community.

If you want people to start noticing you on Twitter, then you have to start noticing them. Go on profiles in your niche and start replying to them. People will begin to take notice, check you out and might even engage with your tweet.

Because to get engagement, you’ve first got to get your tweet seen by people who engage

It sounds like your tweeting into the ether. Adding your tweets to the void of content that Twitter can become. Getting lost in the noise. No matter how “strong” your tweets are, a wider strategy has to be at play to get the results you want.

So let’s talk strategy.

I’m not going to give you the general tips that have been repeated so many times here. It’s difficult without knowing your account and niche, but here are some pointers.

• You want to start engaging in the community. Most people take this as likes/retweets on others’ content; however, the best way to get noticed is to reply/retweet with a comment. Twitter has a habit of bunching notifications, so if you’re just liking to get likes back, that’s probably not going to work.
• Twitter is a volume platform. Replying to one person at most may get you alike from them. You want to continually engage in the community with individual and on popular brand accounts.
• Don’t tweet into the void. People I speak to struggle to grow their account because they expect by tweeting they’ll magically grow their account. While that can happen for a few — Twitter is a conversational platform, so you want to be joining in as well.
• Look at your analytics. It sounds like you’re tweeting different things a trial and error approach. Experimenting is good, but you want to track everything so you can see what’s giving you the most significant results.