4 Tips for Tweets - Getting to the Point

Better tweeting is not about simply increasing your quantity of followers, or about cramming as much as possible into 140 characters. It’s about sending out your message in a way that informs your followers, piques their interest, and brings them to you because you have given them something interesting.

I’ve seen some goofy tweets that go nowhere, so I wrote this short article to provide a few ideas that you can use to distill your tweets down to the essential points.

First, just write the tweet without regard for character count. Marketing writing is about distilling the message, but first you need the message. So just get it down on paper without limiting your creativity with character count rules.

 Now. Let’s start editing.

Eliminate the pronoun. People associate Twitter accounts with a single voice, which translates to a single person or entity (like a company or firm). So you don’t have to use “we” or “I,” as everyone already assumes that your Twitter account always presents this single voice:

Change this:

We just received a new shipment of green, blue, and red donkey carts with brass accents! Your donkey will love them! 15% off this week only!

To this:

Just received a new shipment of green, blue, and red donkey carts with brass accents! Your donkey will love them! 15% off this week only!

Reduce the articles. This is Twitter, not eighth-grade English. No one’s going to rap your knuckles if you leave out a few instances of “the” and “a,” and it makes for smoother copy:

The change:

Just received new shipment of green, blue, and red donkey carts with brass accents! Your donkey will love them! 15% off this week only!

Remove redundancies. Can you find the redundancies in the first sentence? Well, if someone has a new shipment, you can safely assume that they “received” it. So let’s get rid of “received.” In addition, if you “just” received the shipment, doesn’t that make it “new”? Get rid of the “just” and clean it up.

The change:

New shipment of green, blue, and red donkey carts with brass accents! Your donkey will love them! 15% off this week only!

Main message in front. Okay, we’ve distilled it a good bit. Now let’s take a look at our message. What’s the most important point?

• Are you known for your fabulous discounts? (“15% off this week only!”)
• Are brightly colored donkey carts hard to find? (“New shipment of green, blue, and red donkey carts with brass accents!”)
• Are you pandering to people who buy their donkeys’ love with frivolous purchases? (“Your donkey will love them!”)

Let’s say that no one knows what donkeys love as much as you do, and you’re aiming to position yourself as the main vendor to flush owners of vain asses. So let’s do some pandering:

Your donkey will love our new green, blue, and red donkey carts with brass accents! 15% off this week only!

By moving things around, I also got rid of some extra words. Which leaves room for a link or a note about your "low low LOW prices!" on mule hats.

Now, at this point, you could also distill “green, blue, and red” into “primary colors,” but there’s something more evocative about listing the colors, don’t you think?

Remember, get the message down, and then go back and rework. And have someone else look at it before you publish, for Pete’s sake! Embarrassing spelling errors and broken links will haunt you.