There's no a magic formula for generating a viral tweet—but there are some best practices to help increase tweet impressions, engagement and efficiency ratio. What’s an efficiency ratio? Read on to find out!

Our team sat in on Union Metrics’srecent Social Media Summer School webinar all about increasing Twitter impressions, and bookmarked the top takeaways to improve your Twitter strategy.

1. Shoot for a 3-4% efficiency ratio.
An efficiency ratio is defined as your potential impressions (the number of times a tweet from your account could appear in users’ feeds) x actual impressions (how many individuals actually saw the tweet). A 3-4% efficiency ratio is the industry norm for regular Twitter users.

2. Timing is everything.
Consider where the majority of your audience lives. Schedule tweets based on the best times to post for those time zones.

3. Post more often.
The more you post, the more your tweets will appear in people’s feeds. Platform algorithms favor active users!

4. Recycle, reuse, repurpose.
Share the same content more than once, but find unique ways to make the tweets different. Determine what works and what doesn’t by A/B testing different messaging.

5. Leverage hashtags creatively and strategically.
Test different hashtags that make sense for your brand and relate to the content of the tweet. Niche hashtags may be more beneficial in reaching a dedicated audience or networking with like-minded users, whereas broader hashtags can attract spam accounts or be missed altogether due to the volume of tweets being posted to that feed.

6. Follow new, relevant Twitter users.
Refresh your followers periodically and use the Explore pages to find new accounts that align with your content or industry. This helps increase your impressions by ensuring your audience is relevant.

7. Think about your follower-to-following ratio.
Follow accounts that you really want to hear from regularly—it’s about quality over quantity. Union Metrics also recommended maintaining an even ratio of followers to following.

8. Mention other accounts.
This will automatically increase your impressions, better your efficiency ratio and build rapport with other users.

9. Add a video, GIF, or photo to your tweets.
Video snippets and photos grab attention and make the tweet easier to digest. It’s been shown that adding a visual asset to your tweet will typically double or triple your engagement versus a simple tweet with just text copy.

10. Measure results.
Twitter has great built-in analytics, but there are also many other tools to help you understand your Twitter performance. With any platform, testing and analyzing is the key to evolving your content strategy for optimal results.

Tweeting about a brand collaboration? These examples of our Collaborators' recent work can serve as tweet #inspo: