By Agbolade Omowale

If you are, or want to be a celebrity, thought leader, or social media marketer, how you use twitter can determine how far you will go.

Each social media platform has its own pros and cons. When I registered my Twitter account in 2009, I tried to use same methods that worked for me on Facebook, but I got no result. I never knew that using twitter is like operating by new set of rules. Here are seven proven twitter strategies that got me ranked in the top 20% users on social media..

Use 100 characters or less: You might be tempted to always use up the maximum characters for your tweets. However, you need to consider the fact that people may want to retweet and add their comment.

Buddy media state that tweets with less than 100 characters have a 17% higher rate of engagement than longer tweets do.

Use hashtags judiciously: the hashtag symbol # is used in twitter before a relevant keyword or phrase to group those Tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search.

Tweets with hashtags experience 2 times more engagement (21%) than tweets without, whereas, there is a 17% decrease in engagement when using more than two hashtags. Only 24% of brands are using hashtags. Using 3 or more hashtags in one Tweet risks ‘raising the ire of the community.’

Tweet at the right time: On social media, timing is very important. If you tweet around 3a.m in the morning only few people will se your tweet when they wake up in the morning.

Weekend twitter posts used to engage potential or existing client has been show in studies to provide the best results

Use links in your tweets: Studies have shown that people are 86% more likely to retweet postings that contain a link rather than those that don’t have a link

Less is more: The shorter your tweets the better. At times, the more tweets you have, the less performance and engagement they receive.

People get to see a lot of tweets on their timeline. If your tweets are short and straight to the point, they will read it.

Ask and you will receive: If you want retweets on twitter, politely ask for it. Don’t assume your followers will know what you want.  Many brands have confessed that by adding the letters ‘RT’, they noticed an increase of 10 times higher the amount of people that retweeted their post.

Use images: This is like stating the obvious. Pictures can convey your message faster. When brands use images to tweet, the engagement rates double.