10 Tips on How Brands Can Use Twitter Successfully

1. Have a plan. What do you want to accomplish with Twitter? What are you trying to promote? Outline your specific goals for your Twitter account and work toward them.

2. Choose a memorable handle. Ideally, your handle should be your company name or some portion of it. It should be something easy to recognize and easy for potential followers to look up.

3. Stay visible. You could have at least 10 tips on how brands can use Twitter successfully that focus on this point alone. Tweet often and keep your tweets interesting and varied to stay on your followers’ radar.

4. Retweet. Find interesting and relevant thoughts, articles, videos, etc. that others have tweeted and retweet them to your followers. It’s a great way to connect with new people as well as add variety to your tweets.

5. Live tweet. Is your brand involved in any upcoming special events? A book signing, film screening, or trade show? Give updates on your experience in real time and encourage your followers to do the same. It’s a great way to get them involved and excited.

6. Use hashtags. Hashtags make it easy to find tweets about a particular topic. Coming up with a unique hashtag for your brand or a particular event is a great way to gain interest for it. Encourage your followers to use it as well, to spread the word about what you’re doing.

7. Use media. Twitter may have a 140-character limit, but if you post articles, videos, blogs, etc. you can communicate much more in that space.

8. Interact. Engage your followers. Respond to their questions, retweet their comments. It’s a great way to get people excited about your brand, as well as a great way to network.

9. Don’t auto-tweet. If you have something to say, say it. Don’t program a bot to say it for you, every hour on the hour. It’s repetitive, it’s impersonal, and it’s generally considered bad form. Most people just ignore auto-tweets entirely.

10. Use keywords. Relevant tweets can appear in Google searches for a particular topic. Other sites allow you to search Twitter bios for particular keywords. So to increase your visibility on Twitter, find keywords that pertain to your brand and use them in your bio, your tweets, hashtags, etc.

The character limit on Twitter doesn’t mean you have to be limited in what you say or how you use it. Twitter’s popular bite-sized format provides endless possibilities for reaching your audience. And with these 10 tips on how brands can use Twitter successfully, you’re well on your way to making social media work for you.