Hey hubzers!

As marketers and business owners, we know the power of Twitter when it comes to promoting and marketing our products as well as engaging our customers.  But don’t you wish that you had more people reading and retweeting your tweets?

As usual, we are going to give you tips on how to achieve that.  But first, you should know how people behave and share on social media.   Based on data from AddThis, this is how most social media users share content to their network in general:

• A majority of users would click on a content within the first five minutes of it being shared.  But most users click only after 2 minutes!
• Do not fret, however, if you do not see your numbers rise after the first five minutes.  Most clicks (around three quarters of them) occur within the first day after sharing.
• If you run a daily blog and you want to know when the best time to get the new posts out to your social media followers, then schedule your shares every 9:32 a.m. EST.  This is the peak hour of sharing activity.
• If you want to announce something about your business or you want the most mileage for a certain type of content, share it on a Wednesday.

So why do we need to focus on Twitter?  Because Twitter has been growing tremendously, so much so that it has been growing a lot faster than Facebook.  Just think about this:

• There are 50 million users who log into Twitter daily, with an average of 460,000 new accounts created every day.
• These users generate more than 1 billion tweets a week.

Getting Your Tweets Read and Retweeted

Now that you have a general idea of when people share social media content, you might want to get a few tips on how to make sure that your tweets are not ignored.

Remember that you’re on Twitter.    Plan, design and execute your Twitter marketing knowing these things about Twitter:

• Users will not have the time or patience to read their entire streams.
• As far as your customers’ and followers’ timelines are concerned, what you tweet is temporary.

Now down to the specifics:

1. Share more.  If you are only in most of your user’s timeline temporarily (say for only 5-10 minutes) then you might want to share more often.  If you have an analytics program, try to determine when your site, blog and shares are getting the most attention.

2. Keep it short and simple. If you can summarize your blog post in one short and intriguing sentence, the better.  Avoid having to truncate words or using a Twitter app that allows you to break the 140 character rule such as TwitLonger.  People would read and share you less if you talk too much.

3. Make your tweet stands out from the crowd.  With literally millions of tweets every day, it would be very easy for you to get dwarfed.  So make sure that you provide an interesting teaser, state a fact, cite statistics, or say something controversial or bold.

4. Use hash tags.  Hash tags are a great way to alert people in your industry or niche about your tweets.  The more interested eyes see your tweet, the more it gets read and retweeted.

5. Schedule your tweets.  If you run a global company, it might help to schedule your tweets so that your customers from different time zones hear from you when they are actually awake.  One blog post could be used in two different tweets.

6. Ask your followers to read and retweet!