Twitter is interesting to marketers in a lot of ways. It’s a network where people can connect real-time with friends, brands, and resources. By engaging and listening, Twitter helps brands identify prospects while connecting with key people. Twitter also gives brands the platform to participate in conversations about relevant topics, positioning them as leaders in their industry.

Here are some important things marketers should know about using Twitter to enhance their brands’ visibility.

Lists

By organizing tweeps into lists you can create custom feeds on topics you care about. Custom lists allow you to read tweets from a specific group of users you follow.

Influencers

Influencers can be anyone from a celebrity, journalist or blogger to a fan or an employee of your company. The best users to target are bloggers, superfans and employees. Superfans are your followers with a large outreach, and advocate for your brand.

When posting try to reach out to twitter users who post consistently and have an interest in your industry, location or some other facet related to what you do or who you are. It’s always nice to connect with a large audience, but in the end, connecting with one loyal customer is better than hundreds of spotty ones.

Hashtags

Hashtags are key words that are denoted with a # sign. Hashtags show up easily in search and help to connect users with content they want. Hashtags can also be used to facilitate a group chat on Twitter with users commenting on a topic and adding a designated hashtag to unite the thread of discussion.

Use only hashtags that are relevant to the content and don’t use more than two hashtags per tweet.

Updates

Strategize your updates so that they fit in with your overall marketing plan or editorial calendar. If you are sharing something like an image, blog or video add a brief sentence that clearly conveys something about what you are sharing. It’s helpful to shorten links with a trackable URL service like Bitly which can provide you with info on the number of users who click the link.

Click on the image below to learn how to build the perfect tweet.

Good marketers don’t ignore a direct connection to their audience, which is why good marketers incorporate social media into their marketing plan. Building community doesn’t just happen at networking events and board meetings; it happens online with networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn too.

Twitter’s Help Center provides a ton of resources to help navigate the network. Find out more here.