You Would Be Surprised What You Can Do With 140 Characters!

Twit­ter has a lim­i­ta­tion of 140 char­ac­ters per tweet. How­ever by using a few tech­niques and/or ser­vices you would be sur­prised at how much you can cram into this small space! So lets get started!

Learn­ing “small talk”

To con­sis­tently get your tweets under 140 char­ac­ters, you need to under­stand the con­cept of com­press­ing your thoughts. This requires you to lever­age one or more of the following:

• Under­stand­ing Less is more.
• Lib­eral use of abbreviations.
• Spelling isn’t as impor­tant as you think.
• 3^rd party services.

Less is More!

You can’t get “wordy” in tweets.   It takes up to much valu­able space.   Lets use the fol­low­ing as an example:

Long — For what it’s worth, I would really like to go with you to the store. (69 characters).

Short — Let’s go to the store. (22 characters).

A silly exam­ple, but it shows that being wordy can be “costly”. Both mes­sages say the same thing — but the sec­ond takes 47 less characters.

Lever­age  abbreviations

If you have used text mes­sag­ing on your phone, the con­cept here is iden­ti­cal. For those not famil­iar with the con­cept, there are a vari­ety of  com­monly used “short­cuts” — some exam­ples (and the char­ac­ters saved) are:

• u — you    (2 char­ac­ters saved).
• 4 — for  (2 char­ac­ters saved).
• FWIW — For What It’s Worth (13 char­ac­ters saved).
• ROFLMAO — Rolling On the Floor Laugh­ing My Ass Off  (32 char­ac­ters saved).

A com­pre­hen­sive list is avail­able at:

http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/textmessageabbreviations.asp

Spelling isn’t as impor­tant as you think

Let’s start with the fol­low­ing illusion:

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aula­clty ues­d­nat­nrd waht I was rdg­nieg. The phaon­m­neal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoc­c­drnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uin­ervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a por­belm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas thought slpel­ing was ipmorantt!

While it’s unlikely that you are going to know every abbre­vi­a­tion, you don’t always need to spell out every word. And since your spelling isn’t being graded, drop­ping char­ac­ters isn’t always a bad thing. So don’t sweat the mis­spellings (which could become mis­pel­ings — get the idea?).

3^rd Party Services

This gets a lit­tle advanced, but it demon­strates the value 3^rd party ser­vices are bring­ing to the table. Let’s say you wanted to tweet the weather fore­cast for New York City. If you go to weather.com and look up the weather, it will use the fol­low­ing URL:

http://www.weather.com/weather/today/New+City+NY+USNY0981?lswe=new%20york%20city&from=searchbox_localwx

This would con­sume 103 char­ac­ters to tweet! Believe it or not, you can shrink this con­sid­er­ably with some­thing known as a URL short­en­ing ser­vice! Since there are a num­ber of options in this space, I will focus on a pop­u­lar one called   http://bit.ly/ (which by the way is free!)

If you go to the bit.ly site and enter in the 103 char­ac­ter string for weather.com, bit.ly will return the following:

http://bit.ly/7zMoKx

What bit.ly did is take the URL and gen­er­ated a 20 char­ac­ter ver­sion of the URL! Both of these web addresses will get you to the same site, one is just a lot shorter. (I won’t go into the painful details of how it works, but trust me it works).

Dif­fer­ent Twit­ter clients (i.e. Tweet­deck) have inte­grated this func­tion­al­ity for you (and do it auto­mat­i­cally with­out hav­ing to go to the bit.ly). But the ben­e­fit is that you now have room to include your com­ments in your tweet so your fol­low­ers can under­stand why you thought it was important.

That’s it for “small talk” — hope you found it interesting! (and yes — more is coming!).

And as a con­ve­nience for those read­ing this for the first time — links to my recent blog entries in the Twit­ter series:

• Basics of Twit­ter — Part 1
• Basics of Twit­ter — Part II

Pop­u­lar­ity: 13%

Tags: best practices, digital presence, Social Networking, social networks, Technology, twitter

Category: News