Over the last few months two things have happened to me often:
1. I have had a few clients ask what the best practice is for composing tweets
2. I have had clients and/or other agencies submit pre-populated twitter and facebook copy to be integrated into share features on websites.
One thing is for sure… everyone knows and loves the number 140. I don’t. I like things that make sense and solve problems. 140 character tweets often don’t think everything through. Many folks on twitter practice and love the art of retweeting and @ing. They usually fall into one of the following buckets:
1. Brands. They want you to retweet them, often asking to be retweeted
2. Self-promoters. They want to be retweeted. often asking for it.
3. Ass-Kissers/I-know-important-people-ers. The retweeters that like to retweet anything (and i mean anything, even if it is not funny or useful) from a few core people. They like to brag, thank and give off the perception they are BFFs with people they think will give them street cred.
4. Firsts. The people who retweet articles and things overheard first (ironically, second as they are not original- but first to their friends)
5. Mockers/I’m Righters. They like to tweet opinions and then add @_____ to prove their point or call someone/some brand out for something.
So, a new formula exists that solves many of the aboves’ problems…
If your main twitter objective if to be retweeted. Or if you notice that you are the object of someone’s affection and are often rewtweeted… don’t fill the whole 140 characters. Use this formula.
The URL shortener gets longer with custom endings and as they get more popular (bit.ly is running out of 4 character URLs and is, at times, using 6 characters).
subtract even more if you want to live beyond generation 1 retweets. if you want to be part of the “RT @_____ RT @_____” bloated tweets.
With even fewer characters to work with it is important that you get to the point, be interesting and if you are going to toss grammar and punctuation out the window make sure it makes sense- i don’t want to use my ovaltine decoder ring to figure out your deep thoughts. and if you fall into bucket 3, we know who you are. you aren’t fooling anyone.
any other thoughts?
the world according to schmogel. 