Two recent studies from Buddy Media and Bitly offer a lot of incite into the minds of your would be Twitter followers.  Users of social media respond differently to content than consumers of traditional media.

So is your Twitter strategy designed to optimize engagement?  Here are some helpful hints on how to tweak your tweets:

• Timing is huge.  1pm – 3pm EST is the optimal time to reach the broadest English-speaking audience on Twitter because it catches the majority of English-speaking regions during high traffic times.  Spacing your tweets out is also important. 10 tweets between 1 and 3 is likely to get you unfollowed in a hurry, so it’s important not to overwhelm your followers.  No more than 4 tweets per day is recommended for big brands, however depending on the metric you use to track conversions, this number could be different for your brand.  The general idea is the more you tweet, the less likely users are to engage with your tweets.  And since tweets have an average half-life of 3 hours, tweeting at the wrong times can sometimes be deadly to your message.

• Links:  Hubspot’s CTR heat map shows that placing links toward the front-middle of the text of your tweet can drastically improve click-through rates.  Something to keep in mind when crafting tweets and inserting relevant links.

• Hashtags: Too many #hashtags can also be fatal to engagement rates. While 1 or 2 hashtags improve engagement by 21%, 3 or more decrease engagement by 17%.

• Language: As far as the actual text of your tweets are concerned, there are a couple things to keep in mind.  First, if you want to engage your followers, be entertaining. You can’t bore anyone into buying, so choose the voice that fits your business while keeping in mind that people are interested in content that engages them on an emotional level than rather than content that methodically spells out your message.  Don’t be dry.  You may have also noticed this article is written in 2nd person (you).  Communication should be focused on YOU, the one consuming the information.  “Together WE can make a difference” is a weaker statement than “YOU can make a difference”.  No matter what the topic or the industry, people want to hear about the most important thing in the world: themselves.  Content written in the 2nd person will be more engaging, and is more likely to be shared.

• Length: If possible, try to limit tweets to 100 characters or less. Tweets with fewer characters have been shown to gain 17% more engagement. This allows followers to include their own comments when retweeting you.

• Retweetability: Asking for retweets increases your retweet rate by 23 times — but only if you spell out “retweet”. Using the abbreviation “RT” still shows an increase, but only by about 10 times.

Now remember, this is only a starting point.  To get a real boost in engagement, be sure to monitor the analytics of your website and social profiles.  Your own strategy may differ from the average based on the behavior of your unique audience, but these tips can be a great launching point for developing that strategy. You should regularly evaluate and alter your strategy based on new and brand relevant data. In this digital age, things can change very quickly and you won’t want to miss out by waiting a year to revisit your social strategy.

Here is a list of great FREE tools for twitter analytics to help you stay on top of your game!