It’s now official: A lot can be accomplished in 140 characters.
Over the course of nine years, Twitter has become a staple social network for businesses. It has more than 288 million monthly active users, and 500 million Tweets are sent every day.* In addition, 377 Fortune 500s have a corporate Twitter account, and 72% of Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to purchase a product from that brand.**
However, simply having a business Twitter account doesn’t mean much. What matters is how you use that account to tell your brand story.
Here are the 20 best tips for mastering Twitter for business, from social media marketing masters:

Understand Twitter Basics

1. “Being aware of who you are and who you aren’t is critical on Twitter. You only have 140 characters to communicate your thoughts, so every word matters. Your company’s brand and voice seeps into every interaction, passive or active, that you have here. As you grow, you will naturally get a good sense of whom the idealized brand representative should be. How would they talk? How would they respond to conflict? How would they joke around? … Consistency of voice is important, as people like to know what to expect in their interactions with you. Over time, this consistency will help you build trust and confidence with your audience.” — The Moz Beginner’s Guide to Social Media
2. “Use the 80/20 principle. 80% of your Tweets should focus on driving interactions with your followers, such as Retweets, replies and favorites. Once you’ve built some rapport, you can mix in direct offers or promotions that get followers to take actions, such as clicking on a link or making a purchase from your website.” — Twitter for Business
3. “Change your visual branding. Twitter allows you to customize the look and colors of your Twitter profile page. This gives you an opportunity to provide additional information about your business to everyone who checks out your profile. You can create a custom graphic and use it for your Twitter background.” — Charlene Kingston for Social Media Examiner
4. “Don’t spam: This should be a rule across all of your marketing efforts, but it bears repeating here. There are many new accounts popping up with marketers behind them having the best intentions, but no matter how you slice it, spam is spam. Jumping in on irrelevant hashtags to market your product is unhelpful. Likewise, relentlessly mentioning every person in your feed to draw their attention to a piece of content or offer is typically received as annoying. Be sure to keep your tweets relevant, helpful to followers, and spam-free.” — The Moz Beginner’s Guide to Social Media

Plan for Success

5. “Build out your daily plan of attack into daily and weekly to-do’s. Here’s an example of what that might look like [for] Twitter: • Go through monitored keywords (e.g. industry terms, business name, local keyword phrases) and respond to any tweets; • Use third-party tool such as Social Bro to follow relevant people back; • Thank retweets; • Use lists to follow key people within industry or niche.” — Rebekah Radice
6. “Organize and research. Twitter, as well as services such as HootSuite and TweetDeck allow you to set up custom lists (also called “streams”) of people or hashtags you want to follow, making it easy to organize and monitor. Hashtags.org is a great site that allows you to see hashtags that are currently trending. A great companion to that is WTHashtag, where you can look up a hashtag to find out what it is and why it’s trending. You might also find Twellow useful— it allows you to search for users by category and location (particularly useful for finding key influencers in your area). A Twellow account will also make it easier for people to find you, so go ahead and add yourself to their directory while you’re at it.” — Stacy Firth for Cursive Content Marketing
7. “Don’t schedule and split. Automatically scheduling tweets with a platform such as HootSuite or Tweetdeck can be a great way to spread out your business’ social sharing throughout the day. … It’s important to pay attention to any responses your scheduled tweets may elicit. The follow-up conversation is just as important as the initial tweet, if not more.” — Alex Fitzpatrick for OPEN Forum 

Get Tweeting

8. “Talk to people. I’m tired of saying to engage, so will say it another way: talk to people. Chat with them, thank them, tell them stuff, retweet their pictures, read their articles and blogs, laugh at their jokes. You know–much like you would in real life! As Derek Silvers says in his video there’s A Real Person A Lot Like You on the other side of that computer.” — Carol Stephen for Business2Community
9. “When you share something that someone else wrote, don’t just tell people why it’s great and share the link, also include the Twitter handle of the author. This will get you right on their radar as someone who supports and appreciates their work. That’s the first step to building a relationship. Also, if someone writes about you, @mention them when you share the link. This is especially important if you have a good following that will also retweet and engage with the article. Journalists need to write content that gets attention and engagement. However, this also applies to other areas: @mention employees you are trying to attract to your company, partners you’re trying to work with and ideal customers.” — Michael Stelzner & Laura Fitton for Social Media Examiner 
10. “Invite people into a community. Let people know what makes your Twitter followers so great, and entice them to join in. Explain how you bring together like-minded people to discuss shared interests, provide expertise or collaborate on new projects.” — Jimmy Hang for Twitter Small Business Blog
11. “Join a Twitter chat.Twitter chats seem to becoming more popular recently, certainly as far as celebrity Q&As are concerned. But there are also a number of industry-specific Twitter chats that are worth tuning in to that will allow you to gain exposure among people in your sector. Again, it’s about having an opinion and engaging in conversations rather than simply spamming these Twitter chats with promos for your own business.” — David Moth for Econsultancy
12. “Post pictures and videos. People love photos. Your customers and community are curious about what’s around you. What influences you? How does the inside of your factory, laboratory, office, or kitchen look? Share visually and often. People want to know. As a Twitter user, I highly prefer images that are posted through Twitter’s own photo features rather than those posted through another service that forces me to open a new window to view the images (Instagram being the prime example).” — Jill Duffy for PC Magazine
13. “Spotlight positive customer reviews and feedback. If someone is saying something nice about you, a Retweet does double duty: it lets your admirers know you appreciate their support and it shares their positive sentiment with a wider audience.” — Jimmy Hang for Twitter Small Business Blog
14. “Interact. Customers prefer Twitter as the mechanism to truly interact with brands and learn more about them. Facebook is preferred for information about the brand’s activities, and email is preferred for product updates. Think about that for a moment. Customers follow you on Twitter not to be informed, but to be interacted with. They follow you because you answer back and treat them like an individual, if only for 140 characters. But yet so many companies are using Twitter as a post-modern headline news service. Wrong approach.” — Jay Baer for Convince & Convert 

Tweet It Up A Notch

15. “Make the most of Twitter Advertising. If you’re serious about making social media a key component in your marketing strategy, Twitter Ads should be your first port of call. With a scope of 288 million active monthly users, advertising on Twitter can help increase your business reach and generate leads – providing you with measurable ROI. It also generates leads at one-third the cost of other social media channels and is more cost-efficient than Facebook advertising. Even better, now you can use Twitter lists to create tailored audiences for extremely targeted and effective campaigns.” — Rachel Quin for SocialBro
16. “Embrace lists. I find that the most efficient way to consume content is to create lists of the people you follow on Twitter. I make mine private (only viewable by me), and group different accounts that I follow into different lists to make it easier to read. You may have a list that has your competitors, one for customers and one for news, as an example, so that you can easily hone in as to what you are reading via Twitter.” — Carol Roth for Entrepreneur
17. “Twitter engagement for brands is 17 percent higher on weekends. I guess not many people know about this one, because only 19 percent of brands tweet on the weekends. If you’re trying to encourage your followers to engage with you on Twitter, but you don’t want to work over the weekend, you could use Buffer to schedule tweets to be sent while you’re having a sleep-in.” – Belle Beth Cooper for Huffington Post
18. “Monitor and thank your current sales opportunities who are reacting to your content on Twitter. As you can imagine, how you communicate with someone who is currently considering your product or service should be different than how you talk to a random person in your network. You should focus on building rapport and strengthening your relationship with your opportunities, and you can do that by paying attention and being gracious.” — Rebecca Corliss for Hubspot
19. “Lose a few characters. Yes, 140 characters is the technical limit on Twitter, but all the cool kids are now only tweeting with 125 or less. Short, punchy tweets will grab your followers’ attention rather than getting lost in their feeds. The more characters left, the easier it is for people to retweet and add their own comment as well.” — Scott Levy for Econsultancy
20. “You can embed tweets into any website. Embedding tweets into your website or blog is brilliant way to drive engagement back to your Twitter profile. Why? Because an embedded tweet is interactive, and anyone logged into Twitter can do all sorts of cool things (like reply, retweet, favourite etc) to your tweet when it’s embedded on your site (or any site). To embed a tweet, find the tweet you want to embed, click on the more button (…) below the tweet (which is the ellipses symbol – the three dots in a row) and select ‘Embed Tweet’. Now just copy and paste the supplied HTML into the desired location on your website.” — Shea Bennett for Social Times
Do you have any Twitter tips to add? Share them in the comments, and subscribe below and get more tips on crafting and sharing a story that will engage your audience and grow your business.