Interesting study from Buddy Media looking at what and when makes for the best tweet for brands.

It looked at user engagement from more than 320 Twitter handles of the world’s biggest brands looking at how successful they were in terms of getting replies, getting retweets and engagement rate, which it defined as a combination of  @replies and retweets based on the number of followers.

The report showed Twitter engagement rates for brands are 17% higher on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays, but only 19% of brand tweets are published on weekends.

The report highlighted weekend engagement rates are particularly high for sports brands, but that fashion, entertainment and publishing brands could also benefit from weekend tweets.

Brands are also missing out on a “huge opportunity” to engage with consumers because many are not using the hashtag function, the report said.

It added that brands should tweet four times per day or less, use images to drive the highest engagement and add links to tweets to encourage higher retweet rates.

The report concluded, “Twitter is a great way for brands to quickly and easily engage in two-way communication with a massive global audience. As more and more people use the social network, it is critical to understand the best practices for engaging with followers on Twitter.”

 Here are some of the key findings from the report:

Tweeting during the day is the way to go. Tweets during “busy hours” (8am-7pm) receive 30% higher engagement than Tweets published outside that time frame. This includes Tweets published on Saturday and Sunday.

Shorter Tweets work Better 

Its study found that Tweets containing less than 100 characters receive 17% higher engagement than longer Tweets.

That said earlier this year we published research by Dan Zarrella looking at how we can all get more clicks out of our tweets. One of his findings was that you need to ensure your tweets hit what is essentially a “goldilocks zone” in terms of ideal length. This means tweets should be between 120 and 130 characters long to get the best result.

Don’t over do the hashtags

Have you noticed how some hashtag every other word? It is annoying to look at and often quite useless in that they hashtag generic words. The BBC, usually quite good at this, is one such culprit its sprays hashtags around like digital confetti:

Buddy Media concluded that Tweets with hashtags receive two times more engagement than those without hashtags — but going overboard has a negative impact.

Tweets with one or two hashtags receive 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags. Using more than two hashtags actually leads to a 17% drop in engagement.

Your”Tweet Cheat Sheet” below:

You can download the full report, “Strategies for Effective Tweeting: A Statistical Review here.” The report is a companion to its Facebook report, Strategies for Effective Wall Posts: A Statistical Review.