Strategies that Rock the Twittersphere

Many people know that using social networks like Twitter and Facebook can help you grow your business and develop relationships with existing and potential clients, customers and associates. However, it is important to outline a social media marketing strategy that will help you use these tools effectively. Recently, Buddy Media took a look at tweets from the top 320 brands on Twitter to determine what strategies work the best when it comes to building a Twitter following for a company or business.
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They examined three primary factors:

• Reply Rate: number of replies as a percentage of followers.
• Re-Tweet Rate: number of re-tweets as a percentage of followers (including manual re-tweets)
• Engagement Rate: a combination of the replies and re-tweets in the number of followers.

Though some of the findings were logical and intuitive, some of the findings were more surprising. Here are a few that you might not already be doing

Tweet when people are busy. Tweets sent between 8AM and 7PM received 30 percent more engagement than tweets posted outside that timeframe. Perhaps when people are at work or school and in front of the computer all day, they are more likely to turn to Twitter to take mental breaks and engage with some of their favorite brands. Think of it as a high-tech coffee break!

Limit your hash tags. You might think that using more Twitter hash tags will help you reach more Twitter users and thus, engage with more people. According to this study, tweets with only one or two hash tags received 21% more engagement than those with three or more hash tag symbols. Only use them when they are relevant to the content of your tweet – quality is more important than quantity!

Tweet on the days that are best for your industry. Know what days are most popular for you industry before you plan your Twitter content. For example, Sunday and Monday are popular days for people in the entertainment industry because people like to prepare for the upcoming week of concerts, movies and other special events. Sports companies should tweet on the weekends, especially during big games, when fans tune into Twitter to talk shop.

Keep it short. In high school, I had an English teacher who asked us to keep our essays to three pages because “she’d rather read a short bad essay than a long bad essay.” Same goes for your tweets! All kidding aside, leaving room in a tweet allows followers to insert their own text before yours when they re-tweet your message. Buddy Media’s study reported that tweets with less than 100 characters receive 17% higher engagement than longer tweets.

Link it up! If you’re keeping your tweets short, use links to provide followers with more information about your topic. Link back to your own website, but you should also share the “link love” by pointing fans and followers to partner sites and relevant content about your topic. Your generosity will likely be rewarded – tweets with links receive 86% higher re-tweet rates than tweets without links.

If you are using Twitter to help grow your brand or business, which of these Twitter strategies will you try next?