Twitter is becoming a serious platform for brands to reach out to their customers. While most of the big Companies think they’re doing the right things on Twitter they’re not. They’re tweeting on wrong days, don’t use hashtags enough and the most important thing that they don’t do that can dramatically boost their retweets is asking for them — says a new study from Buddy Media. Where they research how marketers use Twitter.

The social media marketing firm, which was acquired by Salesforce, studied 320 Twitter handles from the world’s biggest brands from Dec. 11, 2011 to Feb. 23, 2012.

The findings said: Twitter engagement rates for brands are higher on the weekends with 17% more response received on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays.

However, most brands aren’t taking advantage of this fact or are unaware of and, on average, only 19% of the tweets were published on the weekend. If a brand tweets out evenly throughout the week, then the 28.6% should occur on the weekends. A full copy of the report can be found here.

The Fashion and Publishing industry benefit the most from the weekend tweets.

According to Buddy Media, the brands are tweeting more in the middle of the week than on the weekend

Despite the strong benefits for the weekend tweets, the study paradoxically, also found, that tweets published during the “busy hours” performed the best. Tweets between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. in the study, got 30% higher engagement rates than those that occurred after-hours.

However Facebook gave opposite results, where posts on “non-busy hours” get 17% higher engagement. So Buddy Media recommends using both Facebook and Twitter for your outgoing communication, but using them at different times, which are shown in the chart below:

Meanwhile, the “tweet spot” for the number of tweets per day appears to be four. After that, the law of diminishing returns sets in.

Some important Tweeting Tips from Buddy Media:

• Hashtags: Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement of those without.Using maximum of two hashtags is recommended because the third causes an average 17% dropoff in engagement.
• Tweets with images: Posts with images (even though users can’t see them until they click on them) also attract double the response of those without
• Retweet: Ask followers to “RT,” you’ll get a 12X higher retweet rate than if you don’t. But if you spell out the whole word “retweet,” that figure jumps to 23X.
• Character Length: Buddy Media suggests that Tweets fewer than 100 characters get a 17% higher engagement rate.
• Links: While you’re tweeting you should also include a link, since such linked tweets have an 86% higher retweet rate than their linkless counterparts. However in 92% of cases, the links didn’t work and, Buddy Media informs that was because they didn’t insert a space before the link.

77% of brands in a recent poll said that Twitter was a top priority so these tips from Buddy Media can certainly help them in reaching out to more customers.