This article has been updated for 2020

With a very respectable 330 million active monthly users worldwide, Twitter easily takes a seat among the top most popular social platforms, alongside Facebook and LinkedIn. With such a massive following, Twitter is perfect for getting in front of your target audience, but there is a catch…

With only a limited number of characters (280 to be exact, since November of 2017) to pass your message, you'll need to be concise and creative. Here are 24 tips to implement in your Twitter marketing strategy.

 The Basics

1. Have a Clear Purpose:

• Are you trying to build brand awareness?
• Generate visibility and leads?
• Generate ideas for content?
• Share your insight, ideas, and articles?
• Get informed on industry news and trending topics?

Whichever the case, you'll need to have clear goals to formulate an appropriate strategy, whom to follow, and what kind of information to share.

2. Use a Relevant Profile Picture: It's important you use your brand logo or personal photo when creating a Twitter account (depending on the type of account you have.) Never leave this photo empty as users often filter spam accounts by first looking at the profile picture (or lack thereof).

3. Fill out your Twitter Bio: This is a great opportunity for you to showcase your skills, talk about your achievements, and link back to your site. Share any relevant information you would like visitors to see; e.g. what you value, what your business values, personal awards, etc.

4. Have an Attractive Twitter Cover Photo: Similarly to a profile picture, make sure the image is relevant to your brand, industry, or products. This is one of the first things your audience will see so make sure it is high quality and enticing. 

Need help with cover photo ideas? Here are 23 Brilliant Twitter Cover Photo Examples From Real Brands

5. Have a Memorable Twitter Handle: This will be the username that your audience, customers, and affiliates will know you by on Twitter for as long as your account exists. Make sure it is easy to remember and relevant to your brand and what you stand for. For an example, simply use your brand's name as your Twitter username. 

Marketing tip: use this site to see if the username you're looking for is available across social media. 

Looking for additional insight? Check out this article about The Only Twitter Marketing Strategy You’ll Need in 20!

Tweeting Your Message

6. Be Consistent With Your Tweets (but not excessive): There isn't a limit on how many tweets you should be posting throughout the day, the number is clearly up to you. Having said that, avoid excessive tweeting so your audience does not perceive this as spam.

Marketing tip: use Followerwonk to see what time your audience is most active on Twitter. 

7. “Humanize” Your Tweets: Adding some personality and humanizing traits to the way you tweet will make your message more descriptive and will better connect with the audience's interests. However, avoid being too casual as this may have negative effects and make you look unprofessional.

8. Focus on Increasing Engagement: In the world of Twitter, the easiest way to engage with followers is by simply asking them questions and responding to their comments. Initially, this might not work on everyone so it's important to find your biggest “fans”.

Once you find your biggest fans, go ahead and like, comment, and retweet their posts. Oftentimes, they'll reciprocate by doing the same with your post (and boosting your Twitter reach.)

9. Utilize Twitter Hashtags: Simply implementing hashtags is the easiest tactic to categorize your content, broaden your reach, increase impressions, and help your content become more “findable”. These keywords are aggregated into one location, so if clicked, they can reveal relevant tweets behind each keyword. A great tool you can use to find relevant hashtags is Hashtagify.

10. But Don’t Use Too Many (Hashtags): Try not to exceed two to three hashtags per tweet. Multiple hashtags can actually have negative results, generally showing a decline in engagement. Make sure you are using the most relevant tags for your messages.

11. Use Your 280 Characters Effectively: As we previously mentioned, Twitter doubled their character limit in early November, 2017. In a study carried out then, their initial analysis showed that "Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters."

This showed that most users weren't going overboard with the new character limit. That is sound advice for today as well.

When tweeting, make sure you have a concise message, trackable link (if you’re pushing your followers to another website), hashtags, and an image or video. 

12. Utilize Visuals In Your Tweets: Audiences are attracted by visuals more than anything else. In addition to engagement, visuals can provide additional opportunity to stand out and grab user attention in the noise of the fast-moving Twitter feed.

13. Be Concise and Take Advantage of Your Real Estate: While we may have 280 characters to our disposal, try limiting yourself by not writing too much or too little. What do we mean by this?

If your tweet is too long, the viewer won't finish reading our message. If it's too small, you won't be able to deliver the message to your audience.

Try coming up with 3 variations of your message/Tweet and see what works best for you. Remember to leave room for supplementary optimization elements such as links and hashtags.

Bonus Tip: A quick way to get your message across can be achieved via influencer marketing. A good starting point can be Fiverr due to its low risk and high reward nature.

Boosting Your Reach

14. Find Influencers In Your Industry: Use tools such as Buzzsumo to locate which individuals or accounts have the greatest authority, following, and impact within your industry and consider collaborating with them to enhance your reach, visibility, and credibility. 

15. Connect and Nurture Relations With Influencers: When forming a relationship with an influencer, make sure you're retweeting their content, mentioning them in your posts, and even mention/link back to them in your tweets.

16. Avoid Trying to Push a Sale All The Time: A great mistake people often make is using Twitter to make a sale. In actuality, this social platform is made for generating engagement with your customers and/or targeting new audiences.

Make yourself visible, gain audience attention, earn your credibility, and provide visitors with a reason for why they would like to learn more about your offerings.

17. Avoid Using Overly Branded Content: Today, audiences can immediately recognize content trying to push a sale. Again, Twitter is not meant for this. Instead, offer high quality and relevant insight on topics concerning your industry. Your audience will gain much more value out of this and will be more likely to engage and trust you. 

18. Take Advantage of Twitter Lists: Twitter lists allow users to group targeted user accounts and curate relevant content, posts, hashtags, and trending keywords based on the interests of the listed profiles. In addition to subscribing to relevant lists, it would also be a good idea to create a list of your own. If you are interested in doing so, here's a guide to help you come up with your first list.

19. Create Captivating Headlines: Some Proven Headline Types Include:

• Numbering: Headlines that include listing or numbering have shown consistent performance and are considered among the most attractive for readers.
  • Example: Which title sounds better? (Yes, we know we exaggerated a little here, but we'll go with number 2.)
    1. Market On Facebook
    2. 10 Easy Facebook Marketing Tricks To Double Your Reach

• How to’s: “How to” titles promise readers a certain direction or guidance on how to achieve a certain task.
  • Example: How to Use Sales Data to Increase Sales Productivity by 175%.

• Leveraging Popularity: Oftentimes, leveraging a person or company of influence in your industry can go a long way. This might lead them to retweet your message, or can even open many doors to collaborate!
  • Example: What Tony Robins Can Teach You About Generating Website Traffic

Whichever you decide to use, be sure to always include the relevant keyword you want to be found for.

20. When You See Great Content, Retweet It: When you come along something worth sharing in your stream, don't be afraid to retweet it. By doing this, you're essentially sharing somebody else’s tweet with your own followers. This can accomplish two things:

1. Grabs the attention and appreciation of other influencers on Twitter, which can potentially lead to a collaborative (and friendly) relationship.
2. It shows your followers that you are actively participating and monitoring your online community.

21. Take Advantage of Twitter Advertising: Twitter Ads are excellent at generating leads and increasing your business’ reach, and can do so at approximately a third of the cost of other channels. Twitter ads can also give you the ability to create tailored audiences for effective campaigns with precise targeting.

22. Twitter Can Help You Increase Your Customer Service Potential: The Direct Message and Customer Feedback features can make the customer service process a much easier task. However, if the problem ensues it’s very important to know when to take the conversation offline.

23. Avoid Automating Everything: While automating tweets about your latest blog post is perfectly fine (and encouraged) you should avoid automating all of your tweets. Post tweets, comments, or any other industry related content yourself at regular intervals, and of course, engage with your audience whenever possible.

24. See What Other’s Are Doing, Ease Into It: If you are new on Twitter and you don’t know what to tweet take some time to read what others are writing, how they are formulating their posts, and see what kinds of tweets audience respond to. –further up

And there you have it, 24 Twitter marketing tips for your business. Is there anything we missed? Is there anything you do differently? Let us know in the comments below or message us on Facebook or Twitter!

For more reading on how you can make an impact with your online marketing, see the links below: 

• 20 LinkedIn Marketing Tips To Help You Grow Your Business
• Twitter Engagement - Why You Should Pay Close Attention 
• Get The Most Out Of Your Social Media Posts [With Examples!]
• Viral Contest: How To Generate 1,000 Leads Your First Time
• Improve Your Business Use of Twitter With These Steps
• The Twitter Page Template That Helped Me Gain +40k Followers