10 Tw-Awesome Twitter Tips

Using Twitter for marketing your business or brand is an excellent idea for most. Whether your business is on Twitter for brand awareness, customer service or an increase in sales (perhaps all three), Twitter can provide abundant exposure and branding opportunities that are hard to beat.

As a Social Media Strategist, I’ve noticed that the majority of businesses, brands and entrepreneurs that have Twitter accounts that are fledgling or plodding slowly along is because the business or brand isn’t quite sure how best to utilize this powerful micro-blogging platform.

With the goals of achieving the best click through-rates, exposure and retweets, I’ve pulled together a “Top 10″ list of Twitter tips that should be committed to memory and employed on a daily basis.

Top Twitter Tips

Use Twitter to broadcast interesting content. Ideally, this is content that is relevant to your business or brand and that your followers will find helpful. Unique content is key…especially if it links back to your website or blog, but it’s also good to tweet third party, relevant content.
Monitor your @mentions and respond to them. This is a critical aspect of community management that is often overlooked. If you are just broadcasting, and not engaging in conversations on Twitter, you are under-utilizing a powerful Twitter feature…the @ mention. Monitor for @mentions of your Twitter handle and respond to them. It can be as easy as thanking someone for a retweet or a shout-out. If you’re not monitoring for @mentions, you are also most likely missing questions and opportunities.
Retweet relevant content 2 to 5 times per day. Every social platform has its own inherent etiquette and retweeting others on Twitter is simply part of Twitter Etiquette. Make it a habit to find and retweet relevant content at a minimum of 2 times per day or more. This is also a great way to start relationships or gain notice from those you are retweeting and may result in a reciprocal retweet.
The optimum tweet character length is between 120-130 characters. Not only will this give you the highest click through rate (CTR) on your tweets, it also leaves plenty of room for others to retweet your tweet.
Place the link about a quarter of the way through the tweet for highest CTR. Dan Zarella, renowned social media scientist, did an interesting study of about 200,000 tweets and found this to be the case.
Tweet no more than once per hour for the highest click through rate. Use a social media dashboard like HootSuite to pre-schedule your tweets so you aren’t tied to your computer.
Include a link in the majority of your tweets. It’s been shown that tweets that include links get retweeted more often.
Include words that are proven to produce a higher CTR. Some of these words include: Via, @, RT, Please & Check
Ask for a Retweet or RT. Asking for a RT is proven to be 4 times more likely to be retweeted than those that don’t.
Tweet late afternoon and after hours for a higher CTR. (7-10 am and 2-10 pm). Most businesses tweet during business hours. Try scheduling tweets for different times of day and even on weekends.
Bonus Twitter Tip: Looking for more retweets? Retweet activity is highest on Fridays.

What Twitter tips would you add to this list?

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