5 Tips For Maximising Twitter’s Character Limit

Twitter originated as a mobile phone platform, relied heavily upon mobile users and was developed to make messaging accessible from all smart devices.

Their idea of a 140-character post was based upon the idea of an SMS, as this was the most common way of staying in touch at the time. With other social media forums allowing large statuses and posts, Twitter had to differentiate themselves from these social media networks and creating a 140 character policy to all their posts was the way to do it.

Although the 140-character has proven to be an effective and simple means of engagement, many users have struggled to post messages incorporating links and hashtags whilst still posting a message with strong content representing either their brand or themselves.

This post will act as a guide to assist you with 5 tips of how to tweet whilst effectively incorporating all necessary social media strategies in just 140 characters.

The main trick to writing content on twitter is generally keeping it short whilst keeping it informative and relevant. To do this, essentially you need to figure out exactly what it is you want to say and then figure out various keywords that get that message across to your audience.

Here are a few tips on what the content of your tweets should contain:

• A key word is the key information to what your content is about

• Focus primarily on what exactly you are trying to get across or say to your audience.

• Generally 3-5 key words will produce a solid sentence or purpose for your tweet.

• From Keywords, you can then develop hashtags that will hyperlink your tweet for categorization so when people search that hashtag, your tweet will appear within that category.

• Using key words sets a guideline to what your hashtags will be based upon, but are also considered to be stronger than hashtags as they are everlasting

It doesn’t matter what sort of tweeter you are, we are all tweeting with a purpose. The purpose we tweet for changes and varies among different users, however we all have the same aim in that we generally want our tweets to be seen and be retweeted by others.

Put simply, we want our tweets to be read and we want our content to be found. This is why everyone loves a good hashtag. Twitter incorporated the use of hashtags so that users were able to effectively search for different brands, products and content without having to be bombarded with tweets that were irrelevant to them.

Hashtags are the most commonly used ‘keyword’ link to link your content to a search engine and with millions of hashtags being created and used daily, tweeting without the proper use of a hashtag can have a huge impact on whether or not your tweets are seen by your target audience.

Here are a few tips on the best ways to hashtag within your tweets:

• Tweets with hashtags experience two times more engagement than those without hashtags

• Don’t overdo hashtags, like a key word, make sure your hashtags are relevant to your content

• Have fun with your hashtags- although keeping it relevant, hashtags allow you to be more flexible unlike key words and let you be more descriptive and creative

• Tweets with one or two hashtags have a 21% higher engagement than tweets with 3+ hashtags

• Tweets with more than 3 hashtags have a 17% decrease of engagement

Most twitter users are posting tweets with the intention of linking other users to either a website, page, blog, or image that they want to attract attention to.

Links are usually either 140 characters or more on their own, so tweeting links whilst trying to explain why you are posting the link is challenging. Not only is it challenging because of the character limit but also it is hard to post a link without it coming across as a lazy way to draw attention to what you want to be seen or read.

Links therefore, within a tweet, need to be modified to be short and discreet so users don’t feel like they are being pressured into clicking a link, but instead, feel like they clicked the link because they were intrigued by your tweet and want to find out more.

Here are a few tips on how you should incorporate links into your tweets:

• URL shortening services are essential when your character limit is a mere 140

• If possible, try to find one that offers metrics on click-throughs as well

• Bit.ly, Su.pr by StumbleUpon, Ow.ly and Ow.ly with Hootsuite are great sites which can help you generate metrics on click-throughs

• These sites above will also give you an idea how well the links in your tweets perform

• Link-building and adding links to your tweets is also an essential component for SEO.

A number of third-party tools can help push your tweets beyond mere text and links and with over 232 interactive monthly users, creating tweets which are constantly engaging users and stand out among other tweets can be proven to be difficult.

With new and improved twitter apps and tools, creating tweets that incorporate the use of videos and images are becoming increasingly popular as a method to attract and engage users.

Here are a few tips how your tweets can be more than just text:

• Most Twitter-based mobile apps offer support for adding photos

• The new Twitter offers tools for easy video and image sharing as well.

• You can embed a video within a tweet itself so users don’t have to navigate off-site.

Twitter has given you 140- characters to work with, but essentially the aim is to use less than 140 characters because other users who want to ‘retweet’ your tweet can add their name, maybe a link or even a short lead-in comment to the original tweet.

• Most ‘retweeted’ tweets are either 125 characters long or even shorter than 100 characters

• We are not saying it is necessary to write tweets that are under 100 characters but it is seen as a common method to accumulate retweets

• Tweets that have less than 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement than longer tweets do.