How to Create an Interactive Tweet that will Drive Engagement for Your Company

Have you ever noticed when you post a picture on Twitter that parts might be cut off in the in-stream preview in your timeline?  This can be a curse or it can be your golden ticket to create interactive tweets that create huge audience engagement.

In today’s post, I will walk you through the steps to create your own interactive tweet on Twitter.

Step 1: Develop an Engaging Question

Before you begin to create our images for your interactive tweet, you must create an engaging question that will cause your audience to want to click on your images and play the guessing game.

Do you have a theme or an area you are trying to highlight in your company or your school district? Interactive tweets are great way to communicate your message. 

In our district, we have been developing content that debunk myths about public schools. One area of concern in our state is that graduation rates are dropping for public schools in Texas. So for are interactive tweet, we asked the simple question: Do you know the graduation rate for high schoolers in the Carrollton- Farmers Branch School District.

After we developed our question, the answers were equally important.  And for the interactive tweet to work, we needed four answer choices for our audience to choose from. We choose a low graduation rate, the national graduation rate, the State of Texas graduation rate, and then our last answer choice was the graduation rate for CFBISD, which happens to be the highest.

Step 2: Creating Your Images

**Disclaimer – I use Photoshop, but there are free programs that can achieve these steps

Guessing at what Twitter’s in-stream preview dimensions are not going to work for creating an interactive tweet. Instead of playing a guessing game, you need to remember that Twitter’s in-stream preview always has a 2:1 ratio. Which means that any horizontal image will be cut-off at the top and bottom (Social Media Examiner)

Knowing this 2:1 ratio, you can calculate exactly where Twitter is going to cut your image, which makes creating a interactive tweet much easier.

Social Media Examiner has a wonderful article on creating the perfect image for your tweets. Their article is what I followed to create my answer choices for my interactive tweet.  The article can be found here:

How to Make Twitter In-Stream Images Stand Out

Here are Social Media Examiner’s instructions from that article on how to create the perfect image:

Before you start, find out the dimensions of the image you’re working with, and then find the center of the image.

The full image, divided horizontally and vertically.

Divide the width of your image in half to find the 2:1 ratio and the number of vertical pixels you have to work with.

For example, if the original dimensions of the above image were 2048×1536, the dimensions of the in-stream preview would be 2048×1024. That gives you the number of vertical pixels (1024) and the 2:1 ratio that Twitter will shrink down to 440×220.

Now divide the in-stream preview height in half. Using the same example as above, you would divide 1024 in half to get 612.

From the horizontal line in the center of your image (the Y axis), move up that number of pixels (e.g., 612) on the Y-axis and draw another horizontal line. Do the same thing again, but moving down the Y-axis from the center of the image.

Boom! Everything inside that blue box is the in-stream preview. The blue box aligns with Twitter’s 2:1 template and is centered vertically to keep the best part of your picture visible.

Here are the dimensions I choose for my answer choices:

When you are creating your answer choice images, you must think to yourself what do you want to be shown to your audience (their guesses) and what do you want o reveal to them when they click on an answer choice.

For my images, I put the percentage (my answer choice) in the in-stream preview, and then above and below the preview I let them know if they were correct, and then gave them a hint if they were wrong.

You can see from the dimensions we spoke of earlier in the article that the “93%” will be visible in the in-stream preview, and everything else above and below the blue lines will on be visible when the reader clicks on the image.  In this case, “Incorrect. That was last year’s number” and “try again” were only visible when someone clicked the image.

Step 3: Construct Your Actual Tweet

Once you have your four images created, it is time to construct the tweet you are going to post to your timeline.  And with Twitter introducing the option to post four images in your tweet instead of just one last year, creates the perfect scenario to create your interactive tweets.

The first step is to type your question you created which will be the foundation for your interactive tweet.  Try not to make this too long. Remember that Twitter only allows 140 characters and your four images will use 25 of those characters.

My question was short and sweet:

"Do you know the graduation rate in CFBISD in 2015? Click the correct number. #cfbisd"

Make sure to include a hashtag to classify your tweet and maybe a link so your audience can get more information about your topic.

Next you need to attach your four pictures to your tweets.  Examine the order when you attach pictures.  It might be important for you to have your answer choices in a certain order. 

Once you feel comfortable with your Tweet it is ready to post. Don’t worry about what it looks like before you post.  Some apps or Twitter publishing programs will make it look like too much of you image will be revealed to your audience, but if you followed the above dimensions, it should look great once it is published.

I wrote a post on creating the perfect Twitter post that you might find useful during this step which can be found here:

5 Very, Very, Very Simple Tips to Build a Tweet

We saw awesome results in audience engagement with our interactive tweets.  Hopefully you will see that same type of engagement with your audience.

If you have any questions, or would like to share your own interactive tweet, leave me a message in the comment section below.