Autumn Grace Peterson, Account Associate

Category: Social Media

Over the past few years, Twitter has become much less of a pre-teen hub for duck face pictures and sassy sub-tweeting and much more of a platform for business communication. As a business or a professional, you want to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward. You want your tweet to be engaging, interactive and interesting. But how do you make that happen? Follow these eight tips to craft the perfect tweet.

1. Use hashtags, but not too many.
   On Twitter you want to use hashtags to add your content to related conversation threads and topics, but limit yourself to one or two. Research has found that more than two hashtags actually get 32 percent less engagement. Other sources say tweets with excessive hashtags can be perceived as spam.
2. Use hashtags and links.
   Fit in your hashtags, but don’t forget about your links. Links serve as a gateway for more information for the follower, and higher engagement for you. Tweets with both a link and hashtag outperform those with just one or the other.
3. Add images.
   Twitter has made quite a few changes lately that have made me jump for joy, like the new GIF keyboard (talk about being expressive!) and the function that images no longer count as characters (hallelujah!). Tweets with images naturally cause people to pause as they scroll through their feed. Plus, they tend to perform two times better than tweets without images.
4. Have an obvious call to action.
   Use words like “call,” “click,” or “watch,” to make it very clear what you want the person reading your tweet to do.Research shows tweets with a call to action have 35 percent more engagement.
5. Make sure it’s short enough, but not too short.
   Only 280 characters is pretty short already, but studies show it’s better to be even shorter. At one point there were rumblings about an unlimited character count on Twitter (ick!) but that has come and gone (thank goodness). Tweets with about 120 characters tend to perform best.
6. Write like a reporter.
   Just like the lead of a news story, you want to include the meaty, important part of your message first. People scroll through Twitter quickly and you don’t want the most vital part of your tweet to be overlooked.
7. Intrigue your followers.
   Everyone knows you can’t write a novel on Twitter, so use that to your advantage. Write content teaser, sneak-peek-type content. Leave your followers looking for more, whether that be by clicking on the link you’ve included or coming back to your account for the rest of the story, it is an easy way to work with the platform and increase engagement.
8. Be grammatically correct.
   It is a thing of the past 2 use shortened words and #s 2 communicate on Twitter. Grammar police have spoken and tweets with correct grammar are said to make the user more credible and the tweets easier to read.

There are probably hundreds of tips to crafting tweets, but these eight will definitely get you started. #GoodLuck!