While Facebook steals the limelight in every social media marketing discussion, Twitter remains the best social platform for real time engagement. 
Twitter’s potential as a marketing channel maybe clear, few people approach the platform with the right strategy. What works on Facebook needn’t apply to Twitter, as the dynamics of both of these platforms are diverse.
This is a list of seven Twitter marketing tips that you can apply to your business.
1. Tweet without links
If you’re tempted to include a link on every tweet, hold back every once a while, because tweets without links get more engagement.
Remember, that not all tweets require links, and by being selective, you add value with the ones that do. For instance, SocialMediaExaminer ran a small experiment and shared the same post twice, once without the link. The sans-link post got more engagement.
Twitter is a great platform to initiate and build relationships, have conversations that matter. Ensure that you make the most of that ability. Initiate discussions and acknowledge everyone’s response.
2. Reverse engineer top tweets
How do you know what is going to work on Twitter? Figure out what has already worked for you. Twitter’s analytics automatically reports your top performing tweets for each month. The rest of your best tweets can be found under Analytics >Tweets >Top tweets.
Once you have your top performing tweets, break them down into individual elements. Find common elements across your most popular tweets and construct a formula for Twitter success. This is one of the smartest ways to enhance your Twitter marketing. Your top tweets can be found in Buffer too.
Alternatively, you could reverse engineer other people’s tweets to identify what’s working for them, and apply the same to yours.
3. Curate content
One of the smartest ways to boost engagement on Twitter, is to involve other people. Running an event? Curate content being shared by your speakers and attendees. Managing a blog? Retweet content being shared by contributors and guests.
On a general note, you need to interact with people on a regular basis to build relationships with them. If you’re following too many people, this exercise can be hard. Fortunately, Twitter has lists, through which you can follow and interact with select people.
Yet another alternative is DrumUp, which curates @mentions and hashtags along with articles related to a keyword, so when you schedule posts from the tool, you can add @mentions and catch the attention of important people.
4. Use the right hashtags
If you want to get noticed by the right people, include hashtags that add context to your tweets. Start by finding your most popular hashtags using Twitter Analytics.
You could use RiteTag or Hashtagify to identify the best hashtags for your tweets.
Hashtagify suggests hashtags closely related to the keywords you enter. The tool also calculates the strength of the hashtags, based on their occurrence and usage, so you are best placed to decide which ones to use.
RiteTag gives you the relevance of hashtags. Once you have chosen which ones to use, you can check them on RiteTag to see if they’re not popular enough or overused.
5. Ask for RTs
As social scientist Dan Zarrella has advocated for years, that you need to ask to receive. Traditionally, marketers and salespeople have always instructed their prospects to behave a certain way, but for some reason, asking is considered uncool on social media.
Asking for retweets may seem inappropriate, but it isn’t. In fact, HubSpot states that asking for RTs improves your chances of getting them. Plus, when you spell the word retweet, the likelihood of receiving them increases by 23X.
You can’t ask for RTs on every post, but occasionally, when you need that extra mileage on a post, you can include an RT request.
6. Conduct polls
One of the easiest social media activities to initiate is the Twitter poll, which appears as part of Twitter’s text editor. You simply need to open the tweet composition window, click on the poll icon, and add your question and choices.
Polls are not only fun for your followers, but they’re also multipurpose from your point of view. You can use them for consumer and market research, feedback and general engagement.
It maybe easy to create polls, but crafting questions that can initiate exciting conversations takes some effort.
You could take inspiration from brands that have pulled it off, or social media influencers who know what they’re doing.
7. Tweeting at optimal times
Your tweeting schedule should be decided based on who your audience is and when they are likely to be active on each social network. To identify where most of your audience resides, visit the Audience tab in your Twitter account and look at country.
You could use a tool like Tweriod to figure out the optimal times to tweet based on your audience. The tool records when your tweets get most engagement and suggests the best time intervals for you to tweet.
Tweet timing is critical because tweets have a short lifespan. If you don’t catch your followers within 8-10 minutes of publishing a tweet, you may never be able to reach them.
Wrap
Twitter is a great social platform to connect with your audience real time, initiate important conversations and turn them into loyal fans. However, creating that level of engagement on the platform requires special attention and the right twitter marketing strategies. This post can serve as a great start.