Yesterday afternoon I was graced with this tweet from Stewie Griffin that made so much sense I thought I’d write a blog post about it.
As a community manager a lot of my job is writing content for Twitter. Let me tell you – for those of you who don’t also tweet obsessively throughout the day – being engaging and entertaining in 140 characters day in and day out can be difficult. Add in a client who is super sensitive about grammar and you have a recipe for boring, mundane tweets and a lot of frustrated community managers! Fortunately for all you newbie Tweeters out there, here are a few tricks you should know to turn that paragraph of a statement into a short and sweet tweet.
1. Pick a short handle – I can’t stress this enough. When you first consider setting up a Twitter account for your brand, come up with the shortest possible handle. If you have a twitter handle that is really long you’re pretty much screwing yourself over each time you tweet because it’ll be hard for your followers to RT your message or quote it and add in their response. Pick the shortest, most appropriate handle possible and you’ll increase the possibility for your followers to spread your message to their networks.
2. Link Shortening – This is a no brainer and the new Twitter even does it for you, but sometimes it doesn’t shorten enough. If you don’t use HootSuite (which has its own ow.ly shortener), my personal favorite is bit.ly because it’s quick, easy and you can track the number of clicks your link gets, which is always a nice little bonus.
3. Minimize your punctuation marks – You can always spot a newbie Twitter user because you’ll usually see proper use of punctuation marks. Yes it may be grammatically incorrect, but in Twitter world people are used to seeing (and using) limited-to-no grammar and that certainly includes punctuation marks. So forgo that second, third and fourth exclamation point, your audience understood your excitement with just the first one.
4. Reduce your adjective use – Yes, we know your product is awesome, amazing and brilliant, but for Twitter’s sake pick your favorite adjective and stick with it. If you’re trying to shorten a tweet, chances are there’s an adjective in there you can take out to simplify – and shorten! – your sentence.
5. And vs. & – When it comes to “and” versus the ampersand character symbol “&” it really is a personal choice or brand standard. I’ve seen brands exclusively use “and,” others “&” and yet others both. Personally, if you have the space, spell out “and,” but if you’re trying to reduce the length, don’t be afraid of the ampersand!
6. Abbreviations – If you’re really in a tight jam and you need to cut more characters, a last resort is abbreviating common words. It’s a bit ugly and if you abbreviate too much no one will know what you’re saying, but there are a few common abbreviations almost any Twitter user will understand:
with = use “w” or “w/”
please = pls
tomorrow = “tom” or “tmrw”
because = “bc” or “b/c”
before = b4
(Want a longer list of commonly abbreviated words on Twitter? See this list!)
In the end, shortening your well-written tweet comes down to creativity, writing skills and messaging. You have to decide what you are willing to sacrifice in order to get your message out there among the masses. There are no hard or fast rules, but the trick is to figure out what your solution will be when you need to shorten Tweets and be consistent. Don’t start using random abbreviations your audience has never seen before because trust me, they’ll pick up on the change. And of course if all else fails, there is one final last resort — splitting your tweet into two and using “…cont.” at the end and beginning of each tweet. Of course you could always just scrap that tweet and go back to the drawing board and try to write something completely different, and there’s no shame in that.
Got a tweet shortening technique you’d like to share with the class? Hit the comments and let me know or tweet us @Affinitive!