Twitter is a brilliant unique platform that allows people and companies to express messages in a compact way, unlike any other form of social media. However, taking advantage of Twitter to its full capabilities, both for personal and business use, can be quite difficult unless you know exactly how Twitter works. For this reason, here are three must dos you should undertake before sending out any tweet, both as a personal and business Twitter user, to effectively make the most out of Twitter.

Tweet Length – Try to Keep it Short

Although Twitter changed the maximum characters for a tweet from 140 to 280 in September 2017, this does not necessary mean you have to use up all of the new allocation for a tweet size. In fact, the longer content tends to be online, the less engaged web users tend to be with it. For this reason, always try to keep your tweet as short as possible. This helps to make it impossible for Twitter users not to read it because it is so short. You can do this by systematically questioning every sentence and every word in your tweet: ‘does this need to be in my tweet to illustrate what I want to be said?’

Research Hashtags

Every tweet should include at least one hashtag in it. The way hashtags can be included in a tweet are as follows:

• Within the sentence. For example, if you are talking about something that is a natural hashtag, such as ‘Click here to buy a #Ferrari in the UK’.
• At the end of the tweet. This technique tends to allow you to add a whole range of hashtags, at the end of your tweet, almost like a list of what your tweet relates to. This technique allows you to list, on average, 1-4 hashtags.

As a general rule of thumb, I like to to try and include one hashtag in the tweet sentence and then 1-2 at the end as a list. But, with hashtags, choosing what hashtags you should include in your tweet can be tricky. For this reason, always research the hashtags first to make sure you are including the right ones. By ‘right ones’, this tends to be:

• A hashtag that relates to your tweet.
  • Is trending
  • Has thousands of tweets to it (not trending but very popular)
• Specific hashtag to illustrate a joke.

Proofread!

Although this comes across as a really simply tip to do, it is something that a lot of people still forget to do. It is vital to proof read your tweet before sending it out to the world because Twitter does not allow you to edit a tweet’s content once tweeted. Therefore, if you find you have a mistake or typo in your tweet, the only real options you have is to:

1. Keep the tweet up.
2. Delete the tweet and re-write it again to tweet out.
3. Delete the tweet altogether.

Either way, it is damage limitation to your brand. This can all be avoided from 15 seconds of proof reading on every tweet.