Twitter has become an extremely powerful social media channel. More and more people are using it as a networking tool rather than the social aspect it was originally designed for. Businesses and organizations use Twitter to reach out and create an easy fan base. However, the missing ingredient is the understanding of how to create a quality relationship with your fans. This requires being social, creating customer engagement, which means conversations.

Here are some ways to start and maintain conversations on Twitter:

1. Jump in on a conversation. Contribute to the conversation. Being meaningful and intentional with your comments is necessary to encourage customer engagement.
2. Mention and Reply. There is a difference between mentioning and replying on Twitter. Mentioning is just a tweet with their Twitter handle. A reply is directly replying to the tweet. You can use mentions when starting a conversation that isn’t relevant to the more recent tweets. Replies are used when building engagement around a certain tweet.
3. Ask questions. The only way to answer the question to tweet a reply. That can help begin a conversation, which is the goal!
4. Six hours or less. The faster you reply, the better it looks. People like quick responses, whether they ask a question or just tweeted a statement. Once you’re past six hours, you are no longer a priority.
5. Converse outside of Twitter. Find out if they have a blog, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. Comment on their blog or Facebook posts. Repin some of their pins. Share their blog or pin on Twitter. This will spark some more customer engagement on your Twitter.
6. Don’t end the conversation. If someone thanks you for a retweet or makes a statement on your Twitter, don’t just reply with a simple “You’re welcome.” Add a question to keep the conversation going. Even if they ignore your question, at least the ball wasn’t dropped on your end.

Building and maintaining customer engagement on Twitter can be time consuming, but it is definitely worth the time. Susan J. Campbell is always here and ready to help build your customer engagement through a variety of social media channels.