How to Tweet Effectively For Your Business

Twitter is limitless. Unlike Facebook, your tweet gets posted to the wall of every single one of your followers. People can also search for topics and see your tweet as well. So be sure when you tweet on behalf of your business, that it’s structured effectively to get the maximum impact possible. Here are some tips from our social media marketing team to take your tweeting to the next level.

Leverage Trending Topics

Look for opportunities for your brand to engage with your audience, especially using the topics trending on Twitter. You can view these topics on the left hand side of your Twitter page. An excellent recent example of this was Kit Kat. People were tweeting using the phrase #bendgate about the new iPhone 6 reportedly bending in someone’s pocket. Kit Kat hopped on the bandwagon with a simple picture and the tweet that cleverly referenced their “give me a break” tagline with the phrase “we don’t bend, we break”. The tweet has received over 28,000 retweets and 13,100 favorites so far.

Use Hashtags

When you’re sending out a tweet try to include one or two hashtags. This tells users on Twitter what you’re talking about. It also helps your tweet get found when someone is searching for a topic. These are the keywords in your message you want the audience to notice. Use the search box to test out the phrasing of your hashtag to ensure it aligns with others. For the popular tv show, The Walking Dead, the most commonly used hashtag is #WalkingDead. There is a longer #TheWalkingDeadSeason5 hashtag, but for the sake of the 144 character limit the shorter hashtag is usually better.

Add Pictures

Not only is a picture worth 1,000 words, but it’s also worth an increase in social media engagement. Not every tweet should have an image, but including a relevant image often can help your traffic. A study by Buffer found that tweets with images receive:

• 150% more retweets
• 89% more favorites
• 18% more clicks

To make your pictures go further, make sure they are sized correctly to take full advantage of the in-stream view. Pictures should be 440 pixels wide by 220 pixels high for this. Pictures not resized can be awkwardly displayed in the feed, cutting off people’s heads, text, or other important elements of the image, like the one shown here.

Include Links

Tweeting a message, quote, or picture is great, but what do you want the user to do with that information? That’s where links come in. They’re the key to taking a user from twitter to your website, and hopefully to turning them into a customer. When you’re talking about a blog post or content on your or another website, include a link so the audience can read more about that topic. Always use a link shortener when you’re including links in your tweet to help you save space. Free services such as bit.ly or goo.gl are helpful, or you can use the one built into TweetDeck or HootSuite.