With all the focus on Facebook, Twitter is often the forgotten social media outlet. More recently, Facebook and Instagram accounts are connected to Twitter so we “don’t forget to tweet.” (We believe that’s a bad idea. We wrote about why you should disconnect your accounts.)

With a little attention and care, you can get more followers and increase engagement on Twitter exposing your destination or business, and attracting more customers. People also won’t SMH at your cryptic tweets from Facebook.

Here are eight tips and tricks to improve your Twitter marketing.

1. Try to make your tweets informative, useful, or funny. Social media is about engagement and building relationships, not sales. If you sell, sell, sell, you’ll turn off your followers.
2. Tweet frequently. Daily if you can manage it. 3 to 5 times a day is better. We’ve seen some brands tweet every hour on the hour. That’s a little too much in our opinion. Start with once a day and progress to 3 then 5.
3. It is perfectly okay to re-tweet the same content multiple times! The lifespan of a tweet is estimated at 18 minutes. Tweet out links to your site or blog multiple times over a week or two to give your tweet as much visibility as possible.
4. Add hashtags to your tweets. If your tweet is about coffee, add #coffee to the tweet. Keep it to 3 or 4 hashtags. #Don’t #add #a #hashtag #to #every #word #in #the #tweet.
5. Know when to tweet. Know your customers. When are they checking Twitter? If you don’t know, test your tweets. Try one in the morning. One in the afternoon. One on Tuesday. One on Thursday. Then review the engagement and tweet during the time with highest engagement.
6. Follow trending topics and if your brand is related to the topic, tweet about it. Best success: Oreo when they tweeted during the blackout Super Bowl. Careful though. You make a mistake and the screenshot will live in social media history.
7. Live tweet an event. Your company presenting a seminar? Tweet quotes during the seminar. At a trade show? Live tweet promotions you have at your booth. At a community festival? Tweet the fun things happening.
8. Schedule your tweets. Small businesses with few staff may limit the ability to manage Twitter daily. Use a program like Hootsuite, Buffer or Tweetdeck to schedule your tweets. It’s better than not tweeting at all. You must monitor your account though. You can’t “tweet and run.” Perhaps that’s the next post.

What is your favorite tip or trick for using Twitter? Comment below to share with others and help all of us improve our Twitter marketing.