“I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal


Effective writing requires preparation and discipline regardless of the medium. I’m learning that effective Twittering requires even more than the usual amount of skill because of the 140 character limitation.

  1. If you seek retweets, keep your Tweet around 100 characters. I’ll often see Tweets that my followers would love, but I don’t have the time or the inclination to edit them down. Leave retweeters some room to maneuver. They may want to add a message of their own (but be careful with that, because your retweet will be less likely to be retweeted again).
  2. Write your blog post titles with Twitter in mind. A descriptive, enticing, and short post title helps out folks who want to tweet and retweet it, because now they don’t have to think so much about how to describe it. I’ve attempted to write this post title with these characteristics in mind. (We’ll see how well I succeeded!) Whatever happens, retweets would have been lower had I titled the post - Twitter Tips (too vague) or Things You Need to Know about Writing Super Effective Tweets and Retweets (too long) or Twitter Writing Tips (too boring).

  3. For search purposes, use keywords in your tweets. Lots of people track conversations on Twitter based on keywords. So, if you want to catch the attention of people looking for conversation on “time management,” say that in your tweets rather than “efficiency” or “time mgmt” or “organization”. If you’re not sure what keywords to concentrate on, use HootSuite or TweetDeck and track conversations for various terms and see what kind of conversation quality and volume is going on.
  4. For search purposes, put keywords at the beginning of your tweets. Every tweet has its own URL. Here is a Tweet URL about a new post. I was really hoping to catch the attention of writers. Notice the title tag on this URL: “Twitter / bradshorr: Writer tells her personal …” Twitter picks up the first 40 or so characters of your Tweet. Having your keywords in the title tag of your Tweet’s URL will raise its visibility for real time searches around that term.
  5. Because of the URL effect, some suggest moving the “RT@abcdef” text to the end of a retweet to make more room for keywords. I tried that a few times and it proved very confusing to my followers. For me, it was more trouble than it’s worth, except perhaps for your most strategically important publicizing tweets.
  6. Don’t over abbreviate. If Tweeple have to spend several seconds deciphering your tweet, you will lose them. Rather than jam a 200-character thought into a 140-character space, think it through and create a 120-character message.
  7. For link tweets, effective summarization on Twitter means giving people a reason to retweet or reply or click through your link. For link tweets, you hope that the blog post title does the summarization work for you. For poorly titled posts, develop a list of descriptive phrases to draw from, such as useful tips for and fascinating analysis of and heated conversation on.
  8. My basic summarization formula for link tweets is reason to read + keyword rich topic. Start with the reason to capture attention.
  9. For other types of tweets, summarization technique is hard to reduce to a formula. But generally speaking, less is more. If everyone on Twitter is spewing out 120-140 character tweets, you be the one to go 40-50. The brevity alone will make you stand out and encourage people to read.
  10. When replying, make it easy for the receiver to identify the conversation stream. HootSuite has the ability to display the original message on a reply, but still, it’s an extra step. Remember that someone may view your reply immediately or hours or days later. Responses like “No kidding” and “I agree completely” may befuddle the receiver. Send messages like that enough, and followers will start tuning you out.

Over to You
Agree? Disagree? What Twitter writing tips can you share?

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