Blogging and Tweeting – Part Two

Missed #1? Ignorance is bliss. But hey, read it anyway.

140 characters is shorter than the table of contents on a road sign so you haven’t got a huge amount of space to take advantage of. You’ll have to make the most of it. You’ve got to include a link to the post you’re tweeting about as well.

First of all, make sure you’re tweeting via the correct account: the professional one.

Writing a good summary description of the linked post can be difficult. As a model I’ll pretend we’re about to tweet about the very post you’re reading now. It’s best to start with the title but make sure you shorten it as much as possible. Here’s the title before:

Blogging and Tweeting – Part Two

Here’s the title after:

Blogging & Tweeting #2

Originally 32 characters, now just 22. That’s a whole 10 characters cut off of the tweet and a whole 10 characters of that precious 140 saved. Now it’s best to add the link so you know how many characters you’ve got to write a description. Here’s some tips and tricks about tweeting URLs:

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  Tweeting a whole URL absolutely ruins your chances of fitting in a whole post summary.
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  Shortening a URL can cut off a scary amount of characters. Originally, this post may have a URL like ‘http://www.technokratos.blogspot.com/dateandmonth/nameofpost. That can be cut down to http://www.goo.gl/rolyat1. That’s just a bit smaller.
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  Tweeting a whole URL on the Twitter website will not automatically shorten it.
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  There are a lot of third party applications which will automatically shorten addresses as soon as you paste them into the tweet composition area. You can even choose the service you wish to use to shorten the addresses in TweetDeck!
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  Finding the right URL shortening service for you can depend on a lot of things.
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  The first URL shortening service was http://www.tinyurl.com. Unfortunately, ‘tinyurl’ is seven characters long. Compared to the likes of bit.ly that’s huge. 'bit’ is just three characters. It may sound pedantically picky but it really does add up.
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  Google has a URL shortening service but it’s currently not for third party usage.

I’ll give some more URL shortening tips in the third part of this three-part series but for the time being I’ll just stick with helping you out with writing good post summaries. I’ll again use this post as an model example.

‘Blogging & Tweeting #2’ and ‘http://goo.gl/rolyat1’ is 43 characters. You’ve got 93 left to use.

Take a look at your post and decide what purpose it serves. In this case I’m telling you about URL shortening and how to write a decent post summary for a tweet which you’ll be posting on your professional account. Now cut out the unnecessary bits.

You don’t really need to mention the bit about posting on a professional account.

So you’re left with URL shortening and writing decent post summaries. Now think about who your readers will be and decide which form of language will suit them best. Most of the time it’s best to use informality because Twitter is a pretty laid-back place. But ensure grammar and spelling is accurate.

Example:

How to shorten URLs and write a decent post summary, in 140 characters!

This is just 71 characters. So the whole tweet is just 114 characters long and that’s quite good!

Summary

Shortening URLs can be manual or automatic but either way it’s easy and will save valuable space.

Writing a decent post summary is as easy as adding up the characters from the title and the URL, subtracting the result from 140, and filling the remaining space with a short lump of information describing the purpose and content of the post you’re linking to in your tweet.

Until next time I wish you well!