Twitter has been one of the fastest growing social media platforms and has now reached more than 140 million active users worldwide since 2006 (10 million in the UK). It’s a fantastic way of sharing information, engaging with different audiences and providing customer service.

As a business you can’t ignore the potential Twitter offers to boost brand awareness. With its 140 character limit it’s really easy to share ideas, news, information, opinions, images and videos in seconds. Good content generates interest in your products and services, and promotes interaction with your followers.

Here are 5 tips for better engagement on Twitter:

1. Tweet regularly

Sharing valuable content is the first step to growing your Twitter community. It’s your content that your followers will be interested in, so make sure what you share is helpful, fun and worthy of retweeting. Don’t limit yourself to tweeting a few times a week; tweet a few times daily.

2. Follow

A primary objective on Twitter should be building a community of people you can interact with. Following back is a courtesy – if you don’t follow anyone, then no one would want to follow you either. That doesn’t mean you should follow absolutely everyone; there are inactive users who don’t tweet that you might consider useless because they don’t offer any good content. My advice would be to evaluate everyone’s profile carefully and make your own decision based on activity, description, profile image, background image and relation followers/following.

3. Say 'Thank you' when someone follows you

It’s part of the Twitter etiquette to thank the people who decide to follow you – take it as a compliment! In my opinion, the best thing to do is to send a personal direct message saying “Thanks for following me! What a great picture you have! To find out more about me check out my website [link].” Don’t use the line “what a great picture you have” for everyone – this is just an example to show that the more personalised your message is, the more of an impact it would make and it wouldn’t look like an automated message (yes, you could automatically send the same message to everyone that follows you, but for me this looks more like spam.)

4. Say 'Thank you' when someone retweets you

This is also an opportunity to start a discussion. If someone has retweeted a tweet of yours about Twitter tips for example, why not reply back, saying “Thanks for the RT! Which tip did you like the most?”

5. Make use of the discover tab

There you can find popular stories you can retweet, people to follow, categories that you can browse to find interesting Twitter users as well as the opportunity to search your email address book for contacts that tweet. The latter can be very useful if you are new to Twitter.

If you haven’t started tweeting yet, you should do so right now!

Check out this infographic by LexisClick below that details the basics of Twitter and its features to get you started.

Originally published on Muddywall, the insider's guide to social media.