Three ways to get your brand trending on Twitter

1. Consistently publish sh*t-hot content
Think about the last time you saw a post that made you stop scrolling through your feed. How long did it hold your attention for before you eventually moved on? If you’re like most people, it can’t have been more than a few minutes. If this is true for the best pieces of content, imagine how little time people have for average, or worse, below average content?

Creating content that consistently strikes a chord with your audience over time is extremely hard to do. But if you manage to pull it off, the rewards can be immense. Essentially, you’ll have built a big community of people that trust you not to waste their time and data (yes, data struggles are a real thing). Before they even see your latest post, they are ready to share it, because they know you have a reputation of not disappointing them.

2. Reach out to influencers (the right way)

Influencers can be separated into two categories. There are celebs who are super famous musicians, actors and other public figures. Then there are ‘twelebs’ who have a lot more followers on social media than the average user, but their fan base is generally smaller than that of celebrities. If a tweleb or a celeb shares a post of yours, it exposes your content to their gigantic audiences. Besides increasing shares for your content, it’s kind of an endorsement. If celeb X has a cooking show for instance, and she shares a link to your recipe on her Facebook page, she’s telling her followers that they can trust your page to deliver on their content needs.

Relevance is important when reaching out to ‘influencers’. I’ve seen a lot of radio chart shows tag musicians letting them know how their music is performing. This works because it’s directly about the musicians and the radio shows regularly trend on twitter as a result of the artists retweeting and interacting with shows.

3. Incentivise the creation of content about your brand

Between 10 and 5 held their first two-day #POSSIBLEConference earlier this year and it had a fantastic buzz on social media. A great deal of the buzz came as a result of how they incentivised attendees to create content at the event. To stand a chance of working on a campaign with Estee Lauder, a sponsor of the event, attendees had to take photos where they use certain products creatively. The conference was targeted mainly at creatives, so the incentive was extremely relevant. Dentyne SA used a similar mechanic for their #DentyneSmile competition earlier this year and the hashtag trended a number of times while the competition was running.