15 Twitter Tricks - Get The Most Tweet In Your Twitter Posts
March 23, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Social Marketing
One of the things that makes twitter so great is also one of the things that makes it frustrating to use. Having only 140 characters to post your daily (or hourly) thoughts can be aggravating, if what you have to say takes 145. Re-tweeting adds to this challenge by stealing away some of your precious character resources.
For the uninitiated, re-tweeting is when you forward a post from another user to all of your followers. It usually begins with something like this: "RT @twittername". Re-tweets will usually force you to use all 140 characters, also known as a twoosh, and get you to try to figure out how bad your grammar can be and still make sense.
Here are a 15 Twitter tricks to use for your tweets, particularly re-tweets, that will still allow your twoosh to be comprehendible.
Beginner tricks:
Contractions: take two words and combine them into one word. For instance "it is" becomes "it’s", or "can not" becomes "can’t". Remember this is not English class, so feel free to drop the apostrophe (i.e. cant, its).
Don’t use "and": The word "and" can always become "&" or "+". That gives you two more characters to use.
Words you don’t need: As stated before, the rules of proper grammar do not apply when tweeting, feel free to drop words such as "the", "an", and other similar words.
Remember License Plates: when doing your tweets, try to imagine how you might write if you were trying to write it on a license plate. People get very creative when trying to figure out what they want to say in a very limited space. "Wonderful" may be written "1drfl", or as another example, if you’re old enough to remember the Van-Hargar album "OU812". You have to be careful not to make them to cryptic.
Numbered your Words: related to the above example, you can use numbers and place of words. For becomes "4", "to" becomes "2", and so on.
Dead space: be sure to take out any extra spaces that are necessary, as these are counted as part of your 140 characters.
Novice tricks:
Drop vowels: in some cases, not all, you can drop the vowels from a word, thereby saving yourself a few extra letters. For example "bathroom" can become "bthrm". Just try to make sure that the words are still readable. If you have ever tried to write a real estate newspaper ad in a very limited space, you’ll understand.
Remove pronouns: words like "that", "this", and "their" can be dropped in many instances.
Pluck out the "i": (sorry for the graphic pun, but I thought it was funny) By removing the letter "i" from your posts occasionally, your post can be a little shorter, and make more of a statement.
Symbolism: don’t forget about using symbols in place of words. For instance, use "=" instead of "equals", "number" becomes "#", and "percent" becomes "%".
Shorten words: we do this all the time but sometimes it gets forgotten. Use "w/" for "with", "w/o" for "without", and "love" becomes "luv".
Common Acronyms: there are certain terms that become popular online overtime. They usually start in online games, chat rooms, or texting, then quickly spread into the common vernacular. Some of the current most popular are: "OMG", "LOL", "WTF", "n00b" Sometimes you can even combine the abbreviations, for instance you can combine "OMG" and "WTF" into "OMFG".
Here is a larger list of other online acronyms you can use. But be warned, unless you are writing for a teenage audience, most of these may not make any sense.
http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/acronyms.php
Professional Tricks:
Rewriting Tweets: If you can shorten a tweet by rewriting it and not changing its meaning or intent, then feel free. The people you send it to will be grateful.
Don’t Multi Re-Tweet: It is obviously great to give credit where credit is due, but when Re-Tweeting, just use the original poster, not everyone that has sent it along its way.
Smaller links: Twitter will sometimes short links automatically for you, but you can also use services like bit.ly to give yourself a little more control and squeeze every last character into your tweet.
Please leave me a comment and let me know if this was useful.
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