I’m often questioned about tips on how to write perfect tweets which can help your business grow on twitter. Getting people to follow you on twitter is only as good as winning half the battle and the other half needs to be won by getting people to read your tweets with interest and keep on reading them as part of their daily twitter routine.

There is no doubt that Twitter is the most popular platform for exchanging link content and provides massive business potential subject to judicious usage. Following these simple 7 tips will ensure that your followers not only read your tweets, but are also encouraged to retweet it to their followers in turn.

Keep it simple

Tweets have a very short attention span. If they are too complex or uninteresting, they are likely to be given a miss by most readers. Every day, I open my twitter account; my account shows nearly 50 odd tweets on the screen. Since I hardly have the time to read all of them, I pick the interesting ones and leave the others for another day (which in case of twitter comes rarely).

Make it search friendly

If you are tweeting about a certain topic, make sure to use #hashtags and annotations so that Twitter search facility can seek out your relevant stories. Make sure that the keywords which describe your business are incorporated in your tweets. If anyone searches for recent tweets about a business or a product, your post will appear in the displayed results.

Use Short URLs

Twitters users aren’t fond of reading long URLs so make it a point to use Bit.ly or a similar service to shorten your URLs. Further, characters are real estate in twitter and you just get 140 of them for each tweet so why waste precious real estate in URLs?

I personally recommend using Bit.ly as the URL shortener because it integrates seamlessly with twitter and provides great stats and reports which are handy from tracking perspective.

Don’t oversell

If you try too hard to sell, your tweets will probably end up being overlooked by most users and worse, you are likely to be labeled as a spammer. Try to get people engaged in what you are trying to tell them and highlight why they should go and visit your business website or read your blog. Stir their interest and the readers will oblige – that’s no rocket science, its just human nature!

Think like readers do

If a tweet makes sense to you as the author, it does not mean that readers will like it for sure. The philosophy of ‘I know what you mean’ does not work on twitter. Your tweets need to be accurate, preferably with a touch of humor and must appear ‘pleasing’ to ensure maximum impact and be read by the highest number of viewers.

Use questions as tweets

If you have just added new content to your business site, get the users engaged by popping a question on Twitter. Add the question as a tweet and encourage users to respond with their answers. People love to get into a dialog and twitter is no exception to that rule.

Keep an eye on the competition

Make sure to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. Read their tweets and try to tap their follower base. It does not harm to see what they are tweeting about and how they interact with their readers.

Follow these simple effective ‘tweeting’ habits and reap the rewards that Twitter has to offer for you business.