Our performance indicator changed, so did our idea of what makes a good Tweet. Here’s what we learned from 15 of our best-performing Tweets.

Source: Lessons From 15 of Our Best-Performing Tweets
Lessons From 15 of Our Best-Performing Tweets
BY OLSY SOROKINA | 3 WEEKS AGO | 1 COMMENT
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A few months ago, we started using a different metric to measure the performance of Tweets from the @Hootsuite handle: engagement rate. In Twitter Analytics, this represents the number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions. For example, if you had 5 people engage with your Tweet by either clicking the link or expanding the media contained within it, and 500 people in total noticing your Tweet on their feeds, your engagement rate will be 1 percent. Since the total reach of the @Hootsuite Twitter account is quite wide, our best-performing Tweets usually get over 2 percent engagement.

Once our key performance indicator changed, so did our idea of what makes a good Tweet. So this time, instead of drawing lessons from best Tweets as determined by a third-party app, we’ve decided to share what we learned from Tweets with the highest engagement rate. If some Tweets look familiar, we have indeed discussed a few of them in another post; but as we looked at the engagement rates more and more often, we started noticing trends for composing Tweets that we thought were worth revisiting.

Here’s what we learned from 15 of our best-performing Tweets

1. Be relatable and show character

We wrote about the launch of the video live-streaming app Meerkat after its glorious reception at SXSWi. Since the app was fairly new, the only photos in circulation—aside from the dreaded vertical-video screenshots—were Meerkat’s white-and-yellow logo. But it can be difficult for a Tweet to stand out among the rest when it uses the same image as all the other media outlets. Instead, we illustrated the Tweet promoting the blog post with a popular meme of Timon from The Lion King. (Get it? Because he’s a meerkat.)
We did it mostly for the sake of our own entertainment, so when we saw the engagement rates on the first few Tweets, our jaws dropped. Over the next few months, whenever we sent out Tweets that contained memes, they all performed fantastically. The example above has received over 5 percent engagement rate, and it has been consistently high for Tweets promoting Meerkat-related content.

Intrigued by our initial success, we decided to see if the meme trend would generalize to Tweets promoting other kinds of content. After all, memes are public domain content that’s easy to generate. We’ve used both Success Kid and First World Problems memes to tweet about available job openings at Hootsuite. Similar to Meerkat Tweets, the engagement rate on those Tweets skyrocketed.

We even used a One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor to illustrate a fairly technical blog post about landing pages, which accounted for many pageviews on the blog.
You might wonder why my advice in this section isn’t just to use more memes. When it comes to Internet culture and social media trend-jacking, brands have to tread carefully; a failed attempt to use an inside joke can result in some pretty awkward interactions. However, when you find something genuinely funny—like using a character from a Disney favourite to talk about a hot new app—chances are, someone in your audience will have a laugh, too. We were careful to use memes selectively, and only for Tweets and blog content with the right topics and tone. Make sure that whatever terms or pop culture references you use, you do so tastefully.

2. Don’t be afraid to experiment

One of our best-performing Tweets is a screenshot from a video that explains the reasoning behind the new UI design for the Hootsuite dashboard. And, well, it’s a bit… cheeky.
This particular Tweet scored 3.4 percent engagement rate, but social messaging related to this video has consistently performed well. Now, we wouldn’t gratuitously include explicit content in our Tweets, and we don’t recommend you do it, either—if you want your social media channels to sound professional. In this case, the curse words emphasized the message we were trying to convey: there was a clear need for change, and while it was communicated quite strongly, we thought it presented a good opportunity to talk about the importance of negative feedback. So don’t be afraid to break the rules every once in a while, as long as you understand why those rules exist in the first place.

3. Be upfront with what your content has to offer

Most of the social media content on our @Hootsuite account points to this blog. So it makes sense that we measure the success of some of those Tweets based on clickthrough rates. Sometimes, though, it pays off to showcase the biggest asset of the blog post directly in the Tweet, like so:
Social media posts containing this infographic never fail to receive an engagement rate higher than 2.5 percent. One reason why it works is that the infographic doesn’t show up in its entirety on the users’ feeds—that would be quite inconvenient—so intrigued users have to click on the image to expand it. This increases the engagement rate. It also provides value as a standalone piece of content: users can share the infographic on its own without reading the blog post, and it still provides some valuable information about hashtags. But you don’t have to give away all the juicy parts of your blog post in a Tweet. Instead, give a sneak peek of the blog’s main focus by illustrating it with a graph:
This flowchart illustrates the process of finding the content best suited for your audience. It summarizes the content of the post in an accessible way, and makes the focal point of the blog clear before the user begins reading the advice contained within it. Similarly, both Tweets below showed off the main media asset in the blog post—which earned both of them engagement rates over 2.5 percent.

These examples support the idea that you don’t need click-bait headlines to encourage people to read and share your content. Being upfront with your brand’s value add can be equally effective—if not more so. If you can include a brief summary of your advice, whether this is done in written or pictorial form, you will provide more reasons for your audience to share the content. Finally, your followers will probably appreciate your efforts to save them some time.

4. Keep up with the trends

Our best-performing Tweets, as well as our most-read blog posts, often have one thing in common: they talk about Instagram.

Source: 12 Lessons You Learn the First Year Your Child is a Competitive Gymnast | JAG GYM Blog

Source: It’s not you, It’s me. Taming the crazy gym parent.

Although not necessarily gymnastics related. It is a good piece of information on how we treat our clients.

New research finds that one-in-three Australians are avoiding exercise because they’re embarrassed to be seen or scared of being hurt in the gym. So is it time for a new approach to fitness?

Source: How the fitness industry turns people off exercise

“You’ll never have sex again if you look like that!” screamed the personal trainer. His abuse was targeted at a woman who had made the mistake of entrusting him to help her exercise.

This story came from a client of clinical psychologist Louise Adams. “She was in pieces after that comment. It took her weeks to recover,” Adams says.

This anecdote is just one of many examples that confirmed what Adams, who runs a weight management clinic, has long suspected. People don’t avoid exercise because they don’t like exercising. They avoid it because they don’t like their bodies – and they fear the way other people will judge their bodies.

And now there’s research to back this up. A survey of 1400 people conducted by Nine Rewards for Curves has found that one-in-three Australians are avoiding exercise altogether because they’re embarrassed to be seen exercising. Forty-six per cent of respondents said they have had feelings of anxiety at the thought of attending a gym.

Adams blames what she calls the “pornification of exercise” for contributing to people’s avoidance of physical activity.

“Part of why people are anxious about exercising is because we are supposed to be sexy and physically perfect when we do it. We see images of women in tiny shorts and crop tops and this makes people feel inadequate,” Adams says. “Research shows that the more we are exposed to images of physical perfection, the more depressed and angry we get. This doesn’t motivate; it makes us feel worse and we want to hide.”

At the other end of the spectrum, we’re bombarded with unflattering pictures of fat people and ‘public health’ messages about how they’re going to die untimely deaths. And as numerous failed anti-obesity advertising campaigns highlight, fear and shame don’t help people make healthy decisions in the long term.

Former trainer for The Biggest Loser and director and trainer at Melbourne’s Urban Workout, Andrew Meade says that the exercise industry is often a terrible ambassador for health and wellness.

“It perpetuates the stereotype of ego-maniac meatheads who are unbalanced and totally obsessed with their bodies,” says Meade. “There needs to be more places for people to work-out in a comfortable environment where they won’t feel judged all the time.”

One-third of survey respondents also said that they feared getting hurt at the gym, which is not surprising given the mythology that exercise has to be painful to be beneficial.

Far from being motivational, ‘fitspiration’ and ‘thinspiration’ quotes like “Go hard or go home” and images of people who have been sedentary for 20 years crying and vomiting from the exhaustion of pulling trucks on shows like The Biggest Loser are turning people off exercise.

“People should be pushed to a level that is adequate for them, rather than smashing a person so hard that they leave by crawling down the stairs. They’re not going to enjoy it or want to come back if they can’t walk the next day,” Meade says. “But there is a belief in the industry that we need to punish people during a workout. It’s totally unnecessary and it’s something that the industry needs to address.”

People’s fear of being hurt during exercise is not unfounded.

Physiotherapist and author of Fit Not Healthy, Vanessa Alford questions the education of some personal trainers, saying that many lack the knowledge to keep their clients safe.

“It scares me how little knowledge some personal trainers have in the areas of anatomy, physiology, musculoskeletal conditions and rehabilitation,” says Alford, who has taught the Diploma of Fitness. “Extensive knowledge in these areas is essential to ensure exercises prescribed to clients are appropriate, safe and effective.”

Based on the research, it would appear that the fitness industry is the worst bunch of people to promote exercise to the general population. The toxic exercise culture that it perpetuates – abusive personal trainers, intimidating gym environments, ‘no pain no gain’ attitudes, and the obsession with aesthetics – is a major reason why people don’t want to exercise.

“People need to motivate themselves from kindness rather than fear and shame,” says psychologist Louise Adams. “The literature shows that lasting health behaviours come from self-care, from being your own best friend. That’s what is missing in the exercise industry.”

Still, Adams is optimistic that things are changing. She is running workshops to help people reframe exercise from a punishment to an ongoing process of self-care. She says there has been a lot of interest in the workshops from the fitness industry, which suggests that some people are beginning to realise that the current approach of being mean to people to get results is not only bad for clients, it’s also bad for business.