You think you know a thing or two about using Twitter to promote your product?  If you are using Twitter to drive people to product pages, offers, articles and blog posts, then you need to know what gives you the best chance for success.

Dan Zarella of Hubspot studied this and created a great infographic on how to get more clicks out of Twitter. Here a summary of his findings with a little of our own commentary.

• Keep tweets between 12 and 130 characters.   This makes a lot of sense. You want to say enough to communicate a compelling thought while leaving enough space for the RT and your username. If you want to be re-tweeted, keep your audience in mind and make it as easy as possible for someone to just click RT.  The more time they have to spend figuring out ways to cut words and spaces to get it down to 140, the less likely they’ll be to do it. An RT should just take a second.

• Place links about 25% of the way through.  The highest click rates occurred when the link was a quarter of the way into the message.  This was an eye-opener for me. I usually put the link at the end of the tweet so I can use the beginning of the message to build the call to action. But as they say in the newsroom, don’t bury the lead.  The chart shows that you don’t want to start with the link, but get it in the message early.

• Tweet links a slower pace.  Sending only 1 or 2 links per hour will boost your click rate by as much as 300% compared to more frequent posts.  You don’t want to appear spammy and sending too much of anything becomes noise. Make your tweets count by sending quality links at a slow, but steady basis.

• Choose the right words. Twitter is a conversation so it’s important to recognize the people you are communicating with.  Tweets mentioning others using the word “via” and @ had click rates in the 6% range, triple the click rate of tweets not using the terms. “RT” and “please” were also well received.  It pays to be polite on Twitter.  On the other hand, the use of “@addthis” and “marketing” actually performed worse than tweets without them.  Think about that the next time you click the share button.  My guess is that many share button tweets prepopulate the language in the post so it becomes a lot less interesting if a lot of people tweeting the same thing the exact same way. My takeaway, be creative.

• Experiment using paper.li.  If you are not familiar, paper.li is an automated content aggregator on a particular topic.  Content is collected daily based on keywords or hashtags and posts are sent daily with the words “daily is out”. This must create a sense of ugency people can’t resist. According to the study, these gets click rates in the 30% range.  Sounds like it’s time to set one of these up.

• Use action words: more verbs, fewer nouns.  Tweets with more adverbs and verbs have a much higher click rate than tweets with mostly nouns and adjectives.  This all comes down to being interesting and talking in an active voice. Nouns are passive and boring.

• Tweet on the weekends.  Tweet click rates jump on Saturday and Sunday. A Sysmos report from 2009 shows that Twitter volume is somewhat lower on the weekend, especially on Sunday.  Seems like when activity is lower, your tweet is more likely to get noticed.

• Tweet later in the day.  Clicks rates are high at 9am before fading as the morning coffee wears off.  Lunch must energize people because clicks skyrocket to their highest point in the day at 2pm. Rates fade and jump at 5pm and again between 8 and 10pm.  The study doesn’t indicate whether these are east coast times, but I suspect they are.  So I’m sure the popularity of afternoon tweets has a lot to do with the addition of our west coast friends when they come online.  No matter where you live, avoid 2am to 7am. Nobody’s clicking anything then.

This is interesting stuff. Some of these findings have made me re-think some the ways I approach Twitter for marketing. What about you? Lets talk about it at @bzzagent.