Social media has helped us connect to the world in a way that was practically impossible twenty years ago. Businesses have been quick to adopt it as a useful marketing tool – in particular Twitter, which allows you to connect with strangers worldwide in real time.

But how does one use this new medium effectively? Being a new field, the marketing tactics of social media are still being trialled and tested. It large all comes down to how you compose your tweets. Here are some proven methods that companies have been putting into action.

Use visuals

Everyone is drawn to pretty pictures. A great way to lure people in immediately off the bat is to use images and videos to accompany your posts. If your Twitter page is nothing but a wall of text, it may not strike visitors as exciting. Similarly however, you should make sure images and videos are relevant to you and your business, otherwise your business will seem unfocused. Use images and videos to tell a story about you and your business including local news, your products, your clients, photos of events such as conventions and ‘behind the scenes’ images of your work.

Use symbols

You can also spice up your tweets by adding symbols. Amongst a mass of words, these will similarly draw people in. They can also be used to give added meaning to a post and help stop you exceeding the character limit (for example, doing an ‘It’s Friday!’ post follow by a wine glass emoji). Microsoft Word provides some special characters and you may already have some on your smartphone. If these don’t do the trick, there are more symbols here for you peruse through.

Use viral words and phrases

One of Twitter’s most useful features is its ability to tell you which terms are trending. By linking your tweets to current events, you may be able to use trending words and get more likes, retweets and follows.

However, there are other words that have a high interaction rate. Superlatives like ‘the best’ and ‘the most’ are popular as well as audience referencing phrases like ‘when you’ and ‘make you’. Some interesting phrases that seem to do well are ‘blow your mind’ and ‘what happened to’ – try working these in and see the effect.

And of course, words like ‘follow’, ‘check out’ and ‘retweet’ will get people to react. A common tactic is to offer competitions – for example ‘retweet to win a chance’ type-tweets.

Offer promotions

In a survey, most social media users said that they followed businesses to keep aware of deals and discounts. Fail to provide this to your audience, and you may find that you’re not getting the followers.

The golden social media rule for businesses is generally to make 20% of tweets promotional, the other 80% non-promotional. This keeps your social media fun and engaging without feeling too salesy.

Promotional tweets could be something as simple as reminding users of an existing deal or running a competition. Create a sense of urgency with phrases like ‘today only!’.

To hashtag or not to hashtag?

Hashtags are a way of easily labelling Tweets and a great way to start a trend or ride an existing one. You can label regular tweets such as #weekenddeal and #mondayramblings. Or you can simply latch on to current topics.

Tweets with one hashtag receive two times as much interaction as those without hashtags. Tweets that use more than two hashtags however receive a 17% drop in engagement. In other words, you can use hashtags but don’t overdo them as this can put people off. Similarly, make sure that your hashtags are relevant to the content of your post.

Time your tweets

The time at which you tweet also has a profound effect on its engagement. This can rely a lot on the type of business you operate. Companies that deal in business to business transactions (such as marketing companies, accountancy firms and business product developers) should tweets mainly during weekdays, whilst companies that deal in business to consumer transactions have more of an effect at the weekends. People regularly check their phone first thing in the morning on mobile devices, so morning tweets can be surprisingly popular. You should generally avoid tweeting after 8pm – unless it’s related to breaking news or an important announcement. After 3pm on a Friday is also a bad time to Tweet – those working will be in a last minute panic whilst those that have finished work will be relaxing and trying to get away from the screen.