With the growing popularity of Twitter as a business communications platform, companies have various decisions to make — including these: Does every tweet mentioning the firm’s name require a response? How should firms respond to positive tweets? To negative tweets? How fast should a firm post its response to a tweet?

LeadSift (“Our technology sifts through massive amounts of social data so brands can easily identify customers and engage with them in context.”) recently conducted an important research project on these topics:

“Is it better to answer an irate customer on Twitter, or take the conversation to E-mail? Should you include happy faces in your tweets, or keep them professional? There is no end to the questions that businesses have when developing their Twitter engagement strategy, so we decided to help. LeadSift examined over 10,000 randomly selected interactions from brands and small and medium-sized businesses on the LeadSift platform to see what works, and what doesn’t, when engaging with customers. Take a look at the following infographic for 10 research-backed ways to improve your Twitter customer engagement.”

And click the infographic to read a lot more.