Carroll Community College's Twitter Best Practices for Business

Twitter Best Practices for Business

Create Tweets that Resonate

Combine exciting, useful content with an engaging, unique tone to emotionally connect with your
audience. Include links, pictures and videos. And remember to keep your Tweets prompt and
timely—a crucial element for Twitter success.

Keep Tweets Short

Creativity loves constraints and simplicity is at our core. Tweets are limited to 140 characters so they
can be consumed easily anywhere, even via mobile text messages. There’s no magical length for a
Tweet, but a recent report by Buddy Media revealed that Tweets shorter than 100 characters get a
17% higher engagement rate.

Make it Real-time

Timing matters, especially for breaking news or live Tweets. But how about for everything else? The
short answer: it depends on the content of the Tweet, your objectives, your audience, their
geography and more. The best way to optimize the timing of your Tweets is to test and learn. We
have some certified partners that can help you with this.

Tweet Often

Like timing, Tweet frequency depends on a number of variables such as your audience, purpose and
business objectives. That said, a good basic rule is between three to five Tweets per day. You may
want to try tweeting a couple times a day to see how your audience reacts, then adjust as needed.

Follow Your Interest

Following is a fantastic way to discover compelling content and inspire ideas for your own Tweets.
Follow accounts that are interesting to you or your business.

Simply @Reply

Engage other Twitter users in conversation using @replies and mentions. The @reply feature is
intended to make communication between users easy and seamless.

Stay Trendy

Participating in Twitter trends, whether organically or through Promoted Trends, is how the cool
kids join global conversations.

Use #hashtags

A hashtag is any word or phrase with the # symbol immediately in front of it. This symbol turns the
word into a link that makes it easier to find and follow a conversation about that topic. Use the
#hashtag symbol before a keyword or phrase to allow that word or phrase to show up in Twitter
Search. You may want to find out if the subject you’re tweeting about already has an established
hashtag, and then join that existing conversation, or you can create your own to create social media
buzz around your event. Hashtags can show up at the beginning, middle or end of a Tweet.

Tweets with two hashtags perform better than those with more or less.

Credit Shared Content

When sharing another person or organization’s work, credit them by mentioning them in the post
(e.g. @<inserttwitterhandle>). Not only is it the right thing to do, but they just might engage with
your tweet (i.e. favorite, retweet or comment).

Resources:

 Schedule and monitor tweets – TweetDeck (tweetdeck.twitter.com)
 URL shortening service (allows for custom short urls) with analytics – Bitly.com
 Optimize tweets and analyze competitor Twitter accounts – Followerwonk.com
 Account analytics – Twitter Analytics (analytics.twitter.com)
 Search the popularity of a hashtag – Ritetag.com
 Shared content:

o Search trending shared content – Buzzsumo.com
o Search trending locations and topics – Trendsmap.com
o Identify related hashtag topics – Hashtagify.me
o Use a news reader, like Feedly (integrates with Twitter), to follow blogs