10 Examples of Tweets with the Best Engagement

Twitter is a vague and fickle platform. One tweet might get a million retweets and favorites around the world, while a very similar tweet gets nothing. Engagement is a perfect storm, a convergence of factors, including your audience, the timing, who retweets it initially, what hashtags it uses and the alignment of the planets. Thankfully, you can affect many of those factors. Even, if you’re willing to get into sorcery, the planetary alignments!

What follows are some of the best tweets from 2014, and what you can learn from them.

1. Always Available Xbox

It seems odd to rank a Microsoft platform highly in anything, let alone customer service, but that’s what Xbox has done over the last few years. With long hours and nearly immediate response times, Microsoft has powered their Tweet Fleet into a customer support juggernaut.

What you learn from this, primarily, is the power of being immediately responsive. The longer a user has to wait for customer service, the more likely they are to transition to anger and leaving negative reviews; actions that can be much more harmful than a public call for help.

2. American Airlines and the Hazards of Automatic Replies

Large brands deal with thousands of messages every day, so it seems like a good idea to put together a quick, basic response and make it automatic. That’s what American Airlines did, and that’s what led them to the issue of posting upbeat, positive replies to customer complaints.

3. The Diversification of Whole Foods

Whole Foods is a huge grocery chain, but they don’t act like a corporate account. In fact, they have split up into hundreds of smaller accounts, run by local managers and personalities catering to the specific situations and events in their local areas. It’s the same idea of local SEO targeting for geographically relevant websites.

Furthermore, Whole Foods does one other thing well; content curation. They know their audience is typically health-conscious and looking for organic meals, so the Whole Foods brand tweets recipes and products to suit that clientele.

4. It’s Not Good Delivery

DiGiorno showed the negative power of social media through their obviously now-deleted tweet abusing the #WhyIStayed hashtag. The tag was a place for abused people to let loose their stories about living with an abuser, and why they stayed for as long as they did. The pizza company identified a popular hashtag, but not the purpose behind it, and make a powerfully insensitive tweet.

Let this be a lesson to any and all brands; don’t newsjack what you don’t understand. If you’re going to try to twist a trending tag for your own marketing, make damn sure you know how it’s going to be received.

Oh, who am I kidding? 2015 is going to be chock full of this mistake made time after time. Just make sure your company isn’t the one to hit the news this time.

5. The Curiosity Rover

Sending a semi-sentient machine to Mars and keeping it intact through landing is no mean feat, but what’s even more amazing is getting that robot to tweet its discoveries.

One thing this account shows is the power of a persona. Sure, a good portion of the tweets were very likely written by a scientist at Nasa. We don’t have artificial intelligences quite capable of scientific discourse via social media, yet. The first-person perspective enhanced by the persona of an explorer made this one fascinating account to watch. It was legitimately heartbreaking when the rover ran out of power for the first time and closed down, possible for the final time.

Also, it’s just really cool.

6. Ellen’s Promotional Selfie

A selfie at the Oscar’s in March of 2014 has been setting records every month since. Just one picture of a bunch of celebrities, taken at the right time for the right purpose, has received more than 3.3 million retweets.

What does this tweet show? Well, for one thing, the power of celebrity is immense. Unfortunately, that’s not really a power most small businesses are able to harness. If you can – if you have some Hollywood connection – by all means, milk it for all you can.

Otherwise, most of the power of the tweet came from the timing. It was during a major event, involving important people, and it’s set records because of it.

7. @Notebook and Associated Accounts

The Notebook account is not associated with any major brand or company. It’s managed and run by a media consultant, Branden Hampton, who specializes in making Twitter accounts successful. Even the pithiest, least-interesting tweets on the Notebook account get 500+ retweets, with the average tweet pulling in over 1,000.

Hampton’s other accounts all specialize in dominating a niche. As he says, he has “… a fitness page, that’s more engaged than Nike.” How does he do it? It’s all about the emotional engagement. The Notebook account shows this well; it’s 100% entirely geared towards one type of person in one particular emotional state, and it does well.

8. CNNBrk’s Timeliness

CNNBrk is something of an interesting story. Originally, the account was owned by a third party, who used it to curate CNN stories in an effort to provide a single centralized location for nothing but the most recent news.

As well all know, timeliness is incredibly important, both in marketing and in news. This made the curated stream very valuable to users, who often thought it was owned by CNN. Eventually CNN themselves stepped in and, rather than try to buy the account or get Twitter to turn it over to them, hired the man running it as a consultant. They got some control over the stream, he got some money, everyone was happy.

The account itself is one of the longer-winded accounts out there. Short tweets won’t do when slightly longer tweets can put that much more information on display. While shorter tweets are generally better for engagement, CNNBrk gets away with it by being so valuable and so up to date that it’s worth the extra few words.

9. JetBlue’s Customer Service

JetBlue is an airline with one of the most dedicated and effective customer service teams on Twitter. By making use of that customer service, they have surpassed 1.9 million followers. Their head of social media regularly gives presentations on how to effectively use platforms like Twitter.

What have they done in the past? Both the good and the bad. One man harassed a flight attendant and insulted her via Twitter; JetBlue tracked him down and kicked him off the plane for being a disruption. One woman was depressed to have to fly home and joked about getting a welcome home parade; JetBlue threw her one.

JetBlue, in short, focuses on the organic responses you can only get by living in the moment and having the power to respond.

10. Everything @dril

Warning: Dril is often not safe for work.

Dril is one of the strangest personalities on Twitter. Very little is known about the person behind the account, only that they have an incredible sense of humor. Every tweet has a sort of internal consistency, taking a basic, mostly-normal premise and twisting it into something greater, less sensible and more arguably insane. It’s a very specific brand of comedy that thrives on taking nonsense to the extreme.

Dril proves that basically anyone can succeed on Twitter, given persistence and consistency. If you had told someone a few years ago that one of the best Twitter personalities makes no sense, yet has over 175,000 followers, they would look at you like you were a crazy time traveler. Who are you, and why are you traveling back in time to talk about Twitter?

The point is: do what you do and do it well. People will listen, people will enjoy, and you’ll succeed, even if it takes a while to reach that point. Even if what you do is arguably insane.