I have seen two great posts recently about twitter:
1. How your charity can boost twitter engagement
2. 3 simple ways to drive donor engagement on twitter
The first post details six great tips to improve upon twitter engagement. In my own words, here are the tips provided, and how I feel that these are relevant:
1. Use image psychology, which research has demonstrated creates the highest-click-through rate. I believe the evidence is shown in many posts that are not just for charities, but individual profiles. For example, when I posted an update about graduating university, it was scrolled-past, but when I posted a picture I got over 70 likes!
2. Analyse how the target audience identify themselves and create tweets specific to them. If you want retweets, to be favoured or to make any impact, you need to see what is popular, and to engage best with the audience.
3. Be simple in your ideas. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. If competition do certain services, there is no shame in promoting, and keeping yourselves unique. Use hashtags that you use regularly (I have noticed charities do this to promote their campaigns e.g. #NoMakeupSelfie)
4. Reverse psychology can work to your advantage. If you occasionally suggest not to read something, or not to donate to something, people might really want to.
5. Studies show that readers like to read sentences where the first letter of each primary word is capitalised. I have not personally done this, so I am not too sure!
6. Post tweets that you aim to get extra clicks to or retweeted, so be sure to take the effort to organise a Twitter marketing strategy and post tweets that speak directly to your supporters.
The second and final link instructs three simple ways that Twitter can help to engage and boost your relationship with your audience through retweets, replies and direct messages. It separates how to do all three perfectly.
Retweets:
As described in this post, it is essential to get retweets in order to build "your credibility by associating with other great ideas or organisations and expanding your reach by connecting with followers across the Twitterverse." To make it even easier to retweet, the article suggests that you aim to keep tweets to 115 characters or less. This allows followers an extra 25 characters to add personalisations when they decide to retweet your post!