Pardon the deconstruction here, but I've
had several people ask me "What is Twitter?" and "Why should I care?" (thanks Oprah).
Without getting into the myriad details involved with how an organization can engage
in personalized, one-to-one, real-time dialogues in the public domain, I simply tell
people to think of Twitter as a stream of news headlines, except everyone in the world
is qualified to submit any headline they wish.
Marketers should continue to develop and publish Marketing materials, but should consider
including the following steps in their publication process:
-
Create an account for your brand on Twitter. Keep the name short (reasoning below)
-
When publishing, add an additional step for writing a 100 character headline
-
Use a URL shortener, such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly,
to create a short link to your marketing material
-
Post your headline and URL link to Twitter
If further discussion ensues on Twitter, great. If not, well it's another opportunity
for people to find your message if they happen to search for keywords used in your
headline.
Twitter has a 140 character limit per message. If you want your message to "go viral"
or enable others to share your message, then your headlines will need to be less than
140 characters to accommodate some additional information.
There's no hard rule, but people commonly "re-tweet" messages on Twitter by simply
adding RT and your account name before the original message.
Here's an example character count breakdown of a re-tweeted message (including spaces):
RT @dlog [headline here] http://tinyurl.com/ajskeu
3 + 6 +
107 +
24 =
140 characters
You can see that the URL and retweet information consume 33 characters on their own,
leaving only 107 characters to write a strong and compelling headline. The longer
your account name, the less room for headline characters.
There is much more to Twitter than simply writing headlines, but this is a good fundamental
skill to practice and master for starters.
Happy Tweeting!
