Our intern, Sabrina, analyses Twitter data to bring you the best advice to increase your following.

Hello Neighbourhood Arts Network members and followers! My name is Sabrina, I am an intern at Neighbourhood Arts Network. I learned so many valuable skills at the end of my internship, one of which is social media analytics. So without further ado I would like to share with you 6 ½ tips to increase your arts organization’s Twitter following based on Neighbourhood Arts Network’s Twitter analytics:

1. Tag related arts organizations with a higher Twitter following than your account. This will increase the likelihood of this organization retweeting your information which provides much greater exposure of the information you are sharing and a much greater chance of gaining new followers. And on that note…
2. Take time out of your day to follow more accounts. This is a tedious task but I promise you it is worth it. You can also look to similar arts organizations to follow some of the accounts they are following or some of the accounts that follow them.
3. Include media in your tweets. Whether it is a video, a photo from an event or a digital piece, people are more likely to engage with your account if there is a visual piece accompanying what you are tweeting about.
4. Timing is key! I would suggest posting from 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM or after 2:00 PM. In my research I found that the majority of the least viewed Tweets from us were early in the morning, and also between 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM. The period between 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM seems to be when some people take breaks to check Twitter. Of course this may vary from your arts organization so don’t be too surprised if your results differ. Make time to check your Twitter analytics to measure when your best tweeting times are (by the way this is totally the ½ tip)!
5. If you want to reach a large audience about an event your arts organization is holding, first tweet about a separate opportunity such as a grant or call for submissions. This may sound counter-intuitive but people are more likely to pay attention to tweets if they share information that could benefit the reader. This is your hook. After you have gained people’s attention you are more likely to show up on their Twitter feed, and because you share opportunities (especially those about money), they are more likely to read the tweet about your event. I have noticed that a few of our top tweets were tweeted in the same day. Something to definitely keep in mind.
6. Make time for Twitter and tweet regularly. We may be a little guilty of this but everyone goes through learning curves. The fact is that tweeting regularly helps your account stay relevant and increases your chances of gaining followers. In fact, if there is a period of time when you do not tweet for a while your account is more likely to lose followers. This doesn’t mean that you should start spitting out tweets like word vomit - I would suggest that anywhere between 1-3 tweets a day is good.

Thanks for reading! I hope you learned some new things and I hope that some of these suggestions work for you and your arts organization.