From the category archives:

Tweet Writing

Infographic: What to Tweet—Are YOUR Tweets Worth Reading?

May 4, 2012

BufferDigg DiggThe authors of an academic paper covered by the Harvard Business Review asked respondents to rate 43,000 tweets as either: Worth Reading Not Worth Reading Just OK The overall results: The authors pointed out that “…results suggest that users tolerate a large amount of less-desired content in their feeds. We find that users value information [...]

Read the full article →

How Tweets Can Be a Very UNfunny Version of “Who’s on First?”

May 2, 2012

It can be hard to have a conversation just through tweets. Sometimes it reminds of that classic vaudeville skit “Who’s on First?” Recently I wrote some blog posts to provide folks with questions on a topic a forum to provide more details, but many chose to only communicate via tweets. One gentleman, Dr. Jason B. Whitman, [...]

Read the full article →

One simple trick to writing more popular tweets

September 6, 2011

By testing, I’ve learned that the better a tweet sounds when starting with “Reminder: ” the more popular it is likely to be. Tweets written to seem urgent, timely or containing critical reference information do better than those that don’t. How to use this to write better tweets Just at the editing stage, try starting [...]

Read the full article →

Shocking discovery for writing shorter tweets

September 4, 2011

Really: this actually shocked me. Suddenly I started writing shorter tweets without even trying to! Editing to make things clearer and shorter has been a hobby of mine since I was young—of course I love writing tweets! So, how could this happen? I began using a different interface to write tweets on. It was narrower, so 140 [...]

Read the full article →

Why The #$%& You Should Tone Down Your Language

August 18, 2011

If you’re driving people away who want to hear your message, you’re making a mistake. You’re losing followers and readers. Virtually every day I read an otherwise interesting blog post about Twitter that goes overboard with foul language. Quick tip: If you don’t use foul language in the headline or the tweet about your blog post, you probably [...]

Read the full article →

Twitter only pretends to give you more characters sometimes :(

June 16, 2011

UPDATE: I’ve corrected some misinformation in the original post. Thanks to @WebTrawler for pointing it out. I should have known better. Twitter long ago announced they were going to do it this way, but they changed how things displayed, and it fooled me! My apologies. Most tweets with links will be shorter/get more characters Most URLs [...]

Read the full article →

What makes a tweet great?

April 13, 2011

A great tweet gets: (R)etweeted (even possibly becoming a TT—trending topic). (C)licks on its link. (E)ngagement, including comments and replies (or a response from a specific user) (F)avorited This list of results can be abbreviated “RCEF.” I’m going to give a brief overview of how to write tweets differently to do better for each of [...]

Read the full article →