Twitter for Business: What’s Trending in Twitter

Using Twitter for your small business allows you to keep up with your customers in real time, whether it's providing immediate customer service, researching the newest trends, gathering leads, or checking out your competitors. Keeping up-to-date on where Twitter is going can help you plan your marketing strategies, delivering value and providing your customers with the freshest ideas.

While the company has been making a profit, Twitter's stock has been steadily falling over the past year. Since Twitter isn't going anywhere, this means we will be seeing some changes soon. One change, for example, will be not including links and photos in the 140-character limit for tweets in an effort to engage more activity on Twitter.

What does changing the character limit mean for you? If you've done any research on the “perfect length tweet,” the general advice is that you should stick to around 100 characters. This leaves room for people to add their own thoughts when retweeting your message. However, the addition of quote tweets allows you to attach your own tweet to the original. Just remember, it's the content itself that is important, and shorter tends to be sweeter in Twitter.

Here are some ways to optimize that character length:

• Use call-to-action words! Hurry! Do it now! Limited time offer!
• Ask for that retweet—tweets that specifically ask for a retweet are retweeted 12 times more than tweets that do not. (That sentence has to win some sort of award.)
• Add images. Images receive more click-throughs, favorites, and retweets.

Twitter has also rolled out a new feature, only available on its Android and iOS apps at present, which they are hoping will make Twitter more user-friendly. The Connect button will provide users with a personalized list of accounts and tweets they might be interested in. It's still too early to know if this feature will have any particular effect for the small business owner, but if it makes it easier for users, we may see fewer inactive Twitter accounts—and that could be good for you in the long run.

Currently in beta, conversational ads are scheduled to come out in the next few months. These are interactive ads which enable users to click on a hashtag call-to-action, which is automatically tweeted on their account.

Finally, Twitter has a new ads playbook  available with lots of information on how to use Twitter for your business. One of the predictions listed there is that video traffic will be 80% of all internet traffic by 2018. Are you using videos in your social media yet?

Trends come and go, but this is certain - Twitter and other social media outlets will become an increasingly important part of a good marketer’s arsenal.