Social media is undoubtedly a more and more important component of your overall marketing strategy. Any business that hopes to maintain and build on its market share in the coming decade must learn to master the various social media hubs that will connect them with their consumers at the speed of business today.

As Facebook finds its influence waning, people are looking for the next social hub that will connect the majority of the population. This platform seems to be Twitter with its penchant for immediacy and brevity.

Many businesses are already using the Twitter platform to advertise various introductory offers and special sales. Appointment-based businesses are using Twitter to fill up their schedules so that they do not lose money if a previously scheduled appointment cancels on them.

Aside from Twitter being an incredible way to get new customers, it can also serve as a way to connect your business internally. Below are a few things that you should know about Twitter and how to use it to its fullest advantage.

One – The 160 character limit is actually shorter if you want to market using Twitter.

In order to leave room for the signatures of people who will re-tweet your messages, you must actually make your messages shorter than the maximum number of characters allowed on Twitter. On top of that, shorter messages tend to get re-tweeted more often than messages that are pushing up against the maximum amount of characters allowed.

Two – Hash tags are a great way to expand your local audience.

If you have a brick and mortar store, you can always put a local hash tag on your tweets in order to signal to your local audience that you are here. These kinds of tweets are usually more relevant to local audiences and therefore will gain you more followers and re-tweets within that audience.

If you tweet certain aspects of local news, especially that local news having to do with your industry, you will find that your virility will increase exponentially over Twitter.

Three – Be content to build followers slowly on Twitter.

Twitter is unique in that it you are ever punished for spamming links too many times, you will never be informed by the service. You have to go through a complicated process just to find out that your tweets are not being indexed anymore.

You can avoid this hassle by only tweeting a link in one out of every four tweets. The rest of your tweets should be specific and targeted messages with no hash tags or links involved. Twitter still picks up on keywords within your messages and will index goes accordingly, so you really do not have to place links in every message in order to reach your audience.

Four – Use Twitter to keep up with your employees.

With Twitter, you no longer have to be in the office to check up on your employees. You can send a quick tweet to your office manager or your second-in-command to make it seem like you always have your eye on them.

Will writes for Dewsign, full service web development agency in London. Dewsign create award winning web designers in London producing websites for e-commerce, big brands, Universities and more.