Writing Twitter Posts: Tips and Suggestions
Are you new to Twitter? Do you find the limited space allowed for your posts to be a little intimidating? Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. As a writer, you learn to use adjectives to express emotions and most people explain things more than necessary to help get a point across. When writing posts for Twitter you need to do the opposite.
Your goal is to find a way to say the same thing in as few words as possible. At first, this may be very difficult because most people naturally want to explain things but with only 140 characters available, you have to make it short. The good news is that the more you do it, the easier it’ll get, and below are a few good tips and suggestions that will help.
General Tips for Creating Twitter Posts
Creating good Twitter posts that fall within the character limit takes practice. You have to relearn how to get your point across in a very few words but you will get the hang of it. Once you begin implementing a few general rules such as the ones below, you’ll be writing posts like a pro in no time.
General tips for writing better Twitter posts:
· Use common abbreviations when possible.
· Don’t use unfamiliar abbreviations and slang in your messages because most people won’t understand what you mean.
· Link to blogs on your website, news stories, and other information you want to share with others. Be sure to create a catchy intro to encourage viewers to click on the link.
· Don’t use more than two hashtags per tweet.
· Use symbols whenever you can to help save characters.
Once you get used to limiting your messages, you’ll want to try and keep them around 120 characters instead of 140. The reason for this is that if you use all of the characters with your original tweet, you won’t leave room for others to retweet them.
Be Concise and Selective with Your Words
When writing a post for Twitter, you need to get straight to the point. This is not the time to look for colorful adjectives to make your message sound more interesting. Instead, you want to get your point across in as few words as possible, so only use the words that are necessary to convey your message.
Once you have done that, look for ways to shorten it even more by substituting shorter words with the same meaning. For example, instead of fantastic you can use great and save four spaces. Keep your tweets as plain and simple as possible and you’ll begin to see that there are a lot of words you can leave out and still get your point across.
It takes some getting used to but once you master creating interesting posts that stay within the character limited set by Twitter, you may find that it even helps you to become a better writer. It teaches you how to be more concise by getting straight to the point and that’s something you need to do in all of your writing.
