Twitter is an amazing tool for marketers and communicators to establish real-time connections with consumers. However, cramming in everything you need to say in 140 characters can be a challenge. Here are a few tips to help ensure your audience engages with your content and retweets your messages.

Write Headlines

Newspapers have long managed to work within tight confines to get a message across, and you can beneft from a headline style when composing your Twitter messages. Use an active voice and include verbs and subjects. Try to avoid a rambling, verbose tone that might push you over the character limit.

Share Links

Twitter should be one part of your overall communications strategy that pushes users from one profile to another. The only way to create this loop of communication is to include URLs that will connect the dots and allow you to expand upon the thoughts you are establishing in shorter Twitter messages.

#Hashtag Your Posts

You are writing to connect with people, so you want to make sure your content is easy to locate in a search. Hashtags are a great way of branding your messages for searches so new followers can find you when they look for like-minded Twitter profiles. The hashtag is to Twitter as the keyword is to websites, so be sure to optimize your tweets with a #.

Enrich With Media

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture link is only worth a few characters in your limited message. Save the sentence you might need to describe a situation and instead embed some media. Pictures and video provide some real-world context for your content.

Retweet and Participate

You are creating a digital dialogue, not a diatribe, so you need to promote a back-and-forth conversation with your audience. Share and share alike; when you send out a message, search for someone else talking about your topic and repost that content. You will encourage new audiences to view content related to your topic, which will increase the spread of your own messages.