How hard can Tweeting be? Harder than you might think. You have little room to get your message across, then add a call to action, a link, some statistics, and still leave room for others to comment on your tweet. This compact message must make sense and be interesting enough for others to want to read and retweet or reply.
So what can you do to write the perfect tweet? According to this article by Gerry Moran with MarketingThink.com , one of the first things you need to do is to leave 20 characters for your audience to comment with. So now you are working with just 120 characters.
Start with your message and then add a call to action including hashtags to reach your audiences that don’t follow you.– just one or two will help extend your reach quite a bit. Use a mix of questions, headlines and statistics along with the call to action to inspire your reader. Putting the hashtags in the body of the message makes them less likely to be dropped in retweets, further expanding your reach, but only if you’ve left room in your original tweet for responses.
Limit abbreviations. It’s fine if you are tweeting to your best friend, but in a professional setting, it shows a lack of professionalism and clarity of message. If you have to resort to using things like “ur” for “your,” then you need to reword your message. Don’t use all caps – no one likes to be shouted at. If you really want to emphasize the call to action, surround it with brackets: [blog] or [call today].
Shorten any links in your tweets using a free link-shortening service like Bitly. Links shortened by Bitly have been shown to be more likely to be retweeted than unshortened links.
Finally, if someone responds to one of your tweets – respond back. According to this infographic, over half of all customer tweets to companies are completely ignored! And an ignored customer is likely a lost customer. Would you turn your back on a customer that just walked into your brick-and-mortar store? So monitor your twitter feed and respond to customers in a timely fashion.
140 characters. That’s all the room you’ve got. 120 if you leave room for replies. So go ahead, start tweeting. But remember: It’s not as easy as it sounds. By following some of the advice above and checking out Hostway’s twitter profile for examples, you can write more effective tweets and help your business grow.