The Psychology of Twitter Engagement: How to Get Others to Click on That Tweet
Twitter is the fastest-paced social media platform out there, not to mention largest. Living in a fast-paced world makes slowing down a little hard. However, it’s important to slow down a bit and know how to make your ideal customers be aware of your presence when it comes to Twitter. This article aims to discuss a few psychological theories that may help you to engage your twitter followers more and make sure that they click on that tweet you just posted.
Why do some tweets work and others just fall flat? Maybe it’s the way it was elicited. With 9,100 tweets scrolling each second, Twitter is the fastest-paced social media platform out there and also the largest. It’s important to know how to make your presence known in as little time as possible. To help you get your followers on twitter more engage with your brand, here are four essential psychological theories to be aware of when constructing a tweet.
1) Cognitive Dissonance
People tend to seek consistency in their beliefs and perception, the theory of cognitive dissonance refers to a situation when there are two conflicting beliefs that create a feeling of discomfort and mental stress. When someone experiences a moment of cognitive dissonance, they assuage this by altering their actions or beliefs in order to relieve themselves and restore balance.
How does that tie in with Twitter? When a tweet contradicts one’s beliefs and perceptions, they can’t help but click the link in that tweet in order to reduce the dissonance. Write down some assumptions that you believe your followers have and then craft a tweet with content that contradicts those assumptions. This way, your followers would feel the need to click on the tweet to rid them of the dissonance.
2) Self-Perception Theory
This theory highlights that people develop attitudes by observing their own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused it. After coming to this conclusion, they would act in a certain way in order to reinforce this self-perception.
People will retweet tweets that are consistent with their self-perception. If you’re a fitness business and your followers are fitness enthusiasts, they would want to tweet fitness related topics because it shows up on their Twitter timeline that they are up-to-date with fitness trends. Be consistent with your followers’ perception and most likely, they will share that tweet.
3) Extrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivation is when people are drive to do certain tasks or behavior for tangible rewards. People like receiving things and especially when they feel like it’s a reward. If you would like your followers to be engage, provide links that contain something that they can benefit from.
Offer your followers something of value and make sure your tweets are telling your followers what the value they are getting when they click on the link. This way, followers would feel more inclined to engage with your brand.
4) Norming
This psychological theory deals with the process of constructing norms and the standards that people should follow. For a tweet, make sure you can establish something that is typical for a specific target market.
Norming usually works because if you take a look at peer pressure, it’s real. So make sure to entice people to click on your link that shows them what they should be doing because the world is doing it too. Make sure to utilize certain words like “should” and “ought to” can help you put this theory into action.
Hopefully these psychological theories can help you with your brand and how you can better engage with your followers on Twitter. Just having content isn’t enough when no one is willing to look at it. Keep in mind these psychological theories when constructing a tweet.
For a more detailed blog on the psychology of twitter engagement, click here
If you would like to know more about twitter, here’s an article that discusses twitter response time
