Most marketers tweet too much on the wrong days, don’t use hashtags enough and never ask for re-tweets, according to a study from Buddy Media detailed in this Mashable article. These Twitter faux-pas are causing campaigns to miss out on opportunities for increased engagement with their target audiences.

Between December 2011 and February 2012, Buddy Media examined user engagement from 320 Twitter handles of popular brands. They defined the “engagement rate” as a combination of the replies and retweets to a tweet, factoring in the account’s number of followers. Below are the key takeaways from the study:

Weekends matter. The study found that Twitter engagement rates were 17 percent higher on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays.

Time matters. Tweets published from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. received 30 percent higher engagement rates than those outside those hours. The opposite was true for Facebook, where posts published outside of the 8 a.m. – 7 p.m. window received 17 percent higher engagement.

Tweet Etiquette. The study recommends keeping tweets to 100 characters or less and suggested limiting them to four a day. Tweets with links enjoyed about an 86 percent higher retweet rate and tweets including hashtags received twice the engagement as those that did not.

That being said, using more than two hashtags resulted in a 17 percent drop in engagement.

Much like Facebook, tweets with photos received double the engagement.

Retweet. Asking followers to retweet by using “RT” saw a 12 times higher engagement rate than tweets without. However, tweets that spelled out “retweet” received 23 times higher engagement.

While these strategies serve as a useful guide, we can help you make sure you’re using the strategies that will work best for you specific campaign, and adjusting them based on how your audience engages with your platforms.