What You Can Do To Create Better Tweets on Twitter
First, you should start paring down your language and focusing on efficiency. You don’t have room for introductions, conclusions or asides. Learn to write directly without unnecessary text. Practice makes perfect.
Second, don’t worry about the length of links you might want to share. Sure, some URLs are 140 characters long in and of themselves. That’s okay, because you can use a URL shortening site to solve that problem.
A URL shortening site will allow you to input a full-length URL. It will then spit out a shortened version you can use. What it really does is create a page using a shorter URL that redirects to the original content.
There are a variety of sites at which you can shorten URLs. The most famous is http://tinyurl.com. They’ve been around a long time and most users will immediately understand what they’re seeing when they see a TinyUrl link. You may also check http://turboURL.com and http://cli.gs.
Third, stick to making one point at a time. You might have three things to say, but you’re going to find it very difficult to squeeze them all into that little box. On Twitter, you want to share ideas singularly when you can.
Fourth, you can eliminate the extra spaces. Some people are accustomed to only putting one space after a period or colons.
Those of us who grew up in the age of touch-typing and who learned on actual typewriters were usually taught to place two spaces after periods and colons.
That can be a hard habit to break, but you can safely break it on Twitter. A single space will suffice in those circumstances and your text will still be easy to read.
Fifth, take a look at your Tweet before you send it off to do its thing. Make sure you’re making sense and that that you didn’t come up with something hard to understand, misleading or confused due to the need to compress it into that 140 character block.
Sixth, use the counter to help your editing. Twitter provides you with an indication of how many characters you have left to use. It also let’s you know when you go over.
If you do fly past the maximum, start poring over the tweet to find places to trim the fat. The counter will let you know when you have everything squared away.
Seventh, learn to love the ampersand. That’s the little symbol that shows up when you hit SHIFT+7 on your keyboard. You know, this one: “&”.
It’s amazing how many times you can save yourself a few valuable characters by using the instantly-recognized and universally understood stand-in for the word “and”.
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