Twitter has more than 650 million users and more than 130,000 users sign up everyday. That’s a big pool of potential customers to be ignoring! Make a twitter account, but with a twitter come great social media responsibility. This is one small step for your business, one giant step in the right direction.

Twitter is the most interactive of the social medias for businesses. Think of Twitter as a public texting forum. This is not the social media where you post your music lyrics for the week and your family photos from the weekend before. This. Is. Microblogging. You are limited to those 140 characters per tweet, so tweet wisely.

1. Less characters means more engagement

Microblogging in itself means that you’re already cutting to the chase, but guess what? Customers want you to micro micro blog. Tweets with 100 characters or less have 17% more engagement than tweets that utilize the full 140 limit.

2. Hashtag Responsibly 

Although a key ingredient to a successful tweet hashtags are not to be abused. Tweets containing hashtags have two times as much engagement as those without, but you must contain your hashtag enthusiasm. Tweets with 1-2 hashtags have 21% engagement, whereas tweets with 3 hashtags drop down to 17% engagement. That extra hashtag is not worth the price of lost engagement.

3. Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends

Why are people interacting more with small businesses on the weekends? Because only 19% of brands tweet on the weekend, meaning less competition for your customers attention and retweet. You might be thinking that you will not be using your precious weekends to tweet for your company, not to worry that’s where hootsuite and hubspot come to the rescue!

4. Links might be the missing link

Tweets that contain links are 86% more likely to be retweeted. This is your loophole for using a micro blog to say so much more. Having links in your tweets give you the opportunity to say so much more and have a higher CTR. While links are super helpful to businesses using twitter, you must make sure that the links lead to a mobile responsive page, as more that 70% of twitter users are accessing through a mobile site.

5. Timing is everything

People are 18% more likely to access their twitter during their commute home from work. Meaning the most successful time of day to tweet is from 3-6 PM. If people are on twitter during their workday, they are less likely to engage in your posts as they aren’t supposed to be on social media. The best time for a retweet on a weekday is 5 PM. The best times for a CTR is 12-6 PM.

6. Don’t be shy

Twitter is a social media channel that allows your business to have a personal voice. This is the social media platform for connection to customers. If you need your customers to engage in your posts, just ask. It might seem like a foreign concept to ask your customers to retweets but a 12 times higher chance of engagement might be worth the price of some embarrassment. This is not a tool that should be overused. You don’t want to come off to your customers as a beggar, simply ask for a retweet twice a year for specific campaigns.

7. Tweet and Tweet again

Twitter is a high volume channel for social media. People are constantly interacting with twitter. Content is continually flooding onto a user’s news feed. To remain relevant with other businesses and users, a business needs to tweet 2-5 times a day. Again if this is too much work for you, schedule your tweets ahead of time with hootsuite or hubspot.

If you’re not sure if twitter is the social media for you, read The Essentials to Small Business Social Media to see which social media platform your business should be investing in.