If your thought leadership program is only concentrated on creating and pitching contributed content, you're missing out. By engaging with readers, journalists, and industry influencers on Twitter, you can greatly amplify those efforts. 

Here are four ways how:

Follow and engage with industry influencers

Your PR team has a list of journalists they’re courting and industry analysts and influencers whom they cite in contributed content. Chances are the majority of these industry heavyweights are active on Twitter.

Build a Twitter list that includes all of these influencers, and regularly read and amplify their content. Reply and let them know what you liked about the content they’ve written. In short, use the immediacy of Twitter to start building personal relationships that are all about them—not about your brand story.

Salesforce CEO @Benioff is a good example of this. He regularly amplifies influencer content he’s passionate about, like the above Retweets. 

Reuse and repurpose thought leadership content

When you pitch a piece of contributed content or draft a presentation, you are able to reach a highly-targeted audience. But that audience is limited to the people in the room for the presentation and the subscribers to the publication. Build stronger emotional connections with your audience by Tweeting during conferences and events. Then think about ways to reuse, repurpose, and redistribute your executives’ thought leadership content.

Moz CEO @randfish regularly Tweets his industry event presentations.

Curate and share third-party content

Many brands and their executives stick to sharing only their own content on social media. Build a loyal and engaged following by being a source for sharing highly curated, high-quality third-party content.

Coursera Co-Founder @AndrewYNg regularly shares interesting content on AI and machine learning, tagging authors and influencers. 

Connect with influencers and other thought leaders

Thought leaders often focus on influencing other thought leaders, with an aim to increase media coverage. While this is an important component of a thought leadership strategy, it should also be paired with creating content that resonates with your audience and becoming a valued part of the community that surrounds your product and brand.

Through social listening, you can uncover micro-influencers who are passionate about your topic area. In addition to gaining an understanding of your audience through their Tweets, by engaging with them 1:1 through Twitter you have the opportunity to build a loyal community, which in turn, helps elevate your own content.

@EnjoyLifeCMO Joel Warady regularly converses with his company’s followers on Twitter. 

Don’t let your Twitter profile act as merely another channel for company news Retweets. When used as part of your company thought leadership strategy, you have the potential to change the conversation.

Additional reading:

• Brand yourself — personal branding for business owners
• How to spread your message with the awareness objective
• How to align Twitter content to your marketing objectives

A version of this article was originally published on MarketingProfs.