Twitter is one of the hardest social media platforms to gain exposure on unless you’re an influencer. So how are you supposed to gain traction for your small business, and why should you care? Although Twitter has been in a rough patch as of late, its following is still strong and the platform is referenced daily by celebrities, top-tier companies, news organizations, and even political figures. So here are five tested and proven techniques for getting your business’ tweets in front of an audience that will pay attention.

BE FAST

Twitter is possibly the most fast-paced social network along with snapchat, however, Twitter has the upper hand for your business due to enhanced shareability. That being said, it’s also important to be consistent with your messages because for the average person a tweet has a lifetime of only 18 minutes before getting lost in the twitterverse. In order to bring value to your followers, staying on top of the latest trends and events in your industry is a must. Being the first to address industry news with concise and interesting commentaries can help you gain a higher volume of engagement from your followers with opinions of their own. The more retweets you have, the more visibility you’ll get — and thus, more awareness.

BE CLEVER

Twitter’s famous (and infamous) 140 character limit has forced writers, journalists, and anyone else with an opinion to become more creative with their social media delivery. When a tweet is well-written, concise, and relatable, people take notice and are more likely to share. Humor also translates well amongst Twitter users. Companies that are able to successfully blend their message with humor and include a link back to their website, reap the benefits of 87 percent higher retweet rates, which can be increased by 17 percent if kept under 100 characters.

BE VISUAL, BUT BALANCED

As with any other social media platform, it’s important to include visuals. Text will always look relatively similar back-to-back, and with an average of 6,000 tweets sent per second since November 2016, you’re going to need something to help you stand out. Something alluring enough to stop the mindless thumb-scrolling and immediately capture attention. A few things to keep in mind when making your selection:

1. Twitter users tweet images 361 percent more than they tweet videos. Images got 128 percent more retweets than videos, but videos were favorited 49 percent more than images, according to research completed by Neil Patel.
2. Out of all images analyzed in the study above, 62 percent were meant to convey humor, while the other 38 percent was divided into three other categories: food, travel, and other.
3. And before you opt for a meme, consider the fact that, unlike on Facebook, memes are the smallest percentage of posts sent.

With the importance of images in mind, it is also essential to note that variety is also a major key to success. In fact, Patel’s aforementioned research uncovered that in his particular study, 93 percent of the thousand posts sampled were text-based. This goes to show that a good balance of enticing visuals and text-based posts providing useful information should serve as the ultimate goal.

BE INSIGHTFUL

Creating valuable content for your followers is about more than just sharing industry related news as it happens. Adding your own insight to the things you share provokes engagement from viewers and it lets your followers know that you’re not just an automated bot retweeting different accounts on a queue. And while original content is more genuine, tweeting quotes (especially in the form of an image) has outperformed tweets that ask questions by 847 percent when it comes to retweets. However, tweets that posed questions received 1,050 percent more replies in this study. Alternatively, instead of simply waiting for people to engage with your brand on Twitter, you could make the first move and reach out to followers. A good place to start would be by going through your followers and sectioning off the top influencers.

If you’ve been having trouble connecting to your Twitter audience, or if you just haven’t had the time to focus on your social media marketing efforts, feel free to call your local South Florida advertising agency.

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