5 Twitter Tips For Businesses

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Social media has become a vital tool for business, however many are still unsure how to use it effectively. Check out these five Twitter tips for businesses and make sure you implement them into your social media strategy!

  1. Be authentic and establish your brand’s voice

Your customer’s don’t want to interact with a robot-like account that just tweets boring company news day in and day out.

First of all, decide whether your business is going to use the ‘I’ or ‘we’ pronoun. Next, if you want to tweet company news, make the tweet interesting and engaging. For example, if your company sells mobile phones and you’ve just released a new model “We’ve been working hard on a little surprise for you all. Check it out: [LINK] #Perfect for #Christmas [IMAGE]” is going to sound a lot more like a human than “[MOBILE PHONE MODEL] out now: [LINK]” isn’t it? Plus, extra brownie points are awarded for making things current.

When I worked at 7digital, I loved their brand voice. It was corporate-casual (still is).

  1. Engage Your Audience

Right, so you’ve shared you company news but the chances are your followers don’t actually care. Just because they like your products does not mean they care about your company/brand itself. So, how do you get the to care? Engage. Engaging with your followers can be as simple as replying to your mentions, tweeting questions for your followers to answer or, if you’re willing to go the extra mile, running competitions.

Even simple things like asking for shares in your tweets can boost retweets. Writing ‘RT’ increases chance of your tweet being retweeted by 10x, and spelling out the word ‘retweet’ in full increases your chances by a whopping 23x.

Engaging your audience can even be something as simple as this:

  1. Use visual media

Twitter now allows you to send images, gifs and even vines with your tweets while still allowing them to display in the Twitter app. You may think that images belong on social networks such as Instagram and, as you’ve cleverly linked your Instagram to your Twitter account, you don’t need to post images on Twitter, but research shows that Tweets with instagram links are actually 42% less likely to be retweeted (than tweets without Instagram links), whereas tweets with native pic.twitter.com images are 94% more likely to be retweeted (than tweets without pic.twitter.com links).

In terms of overall engagement, tweets with images get 2x the engagement rate than tweets without images.

It is usually better to tweet images as native Twitter pictures, unlink your Instagram and Twitter accounts and just occasionally promote your Instagram account on your Twitter page to encourage your followers to stay connected across all networks. It’s worth noting, however, that users are more likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter rather than on Instagram.

Don’t forget you can tweet gifs now too!

  1. Keep It Short

Tweets with less than 100 characters get 17% more engagement. As a business, many of your tweets are likely to contain links and, even if the links are shortened, this can significantly add to the character count. Research has found that tweets containing links that are between 120-130 characters get the highest click-through rates, so try and keep in short and sweet where you can. Not using all the characters in a tweet also makes it easier for people to quote tweet you.

  1. Plan when to tweet

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There is a lot of material on the internet worshipping 3pm as the optimum time to tweet (it does work quite well), however it’s not the only time you can get your audience’s attention. Many users access Twitter predominantly from a mobile device and it’s these users who are likely to be scrolling through their timeline at 8am as they commute to work. In fact, they’re a whole 181% more likely to be on Twitter during this time. They’re bored and in need of something to brighten up there morning, so take the opportunity to engage with them or give them a good article to read!

Also, don’t forget the weekends! 9-5, Monday-Friday is the way most offices work, often leaving their social media accounts inactive over the weekend (yes, 81% of brands DON’T tweet at weekends). With engagement rates for brands being 17% higher on the weekends, this is not something you can afford to do. You don’t have to pay someone to trek into the office on a Saturday to take advantage of these engagement rates, just make sure you schedule some tweets to go out over the weekend to satisfy your followers’ appetites. I personally use Hootsuite for all scheduling.

Need more convincing? Check out these tips from other social media enthusiasts:

“Be transparent and human like! Being open and friendly is hugely important in gaining trust from your customers/clients.” – Sharri Morris, Marketing Manager at 7digital

“I’d say to be a little bit personal. I love hearing about the staff and office dogs and opinions. Plus people love to argue so opinions can always get a conversation going.” – Katie Stainton, Content Assistant at Autograph.me

“Stay relevant, don’t repeat yourself, provide insight and don’t only tweet about yourself.” – Kelaine Blades, EMEA Marketing Director at Sizmek

Statistics from Buffer and Dan Zarrella

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