Following on from our previous article, you may still be in the early stages of having your own Twitter account. This is the perfect time to learn about some of the ways you can use those 140 characters available to you.

Do you really need to use 140 characters?

Many people relish the challenge of making an entire message out of 140 characters, well done if you manage to do this, but think for a second. By making all your messages 140 characters long, are you stopping someone from forwarding or re-tweeting your message onto their followers? When you tweet think about whether you want this message to be forwarded on or not. For those that you’re not bothered about, make them as long as you like. If you’re keen to see them passed on and on, leave some space for the next person to add some Re-tweet (RT) details.

Tweet Body

Treat your messages as small concise snippets of information with keywords mixed in, no need to write an essay, when small bullet type messages will be more usable.

Hash Tags

Hash tags (#) are used by Twitter to highlight words or phrases that allow you to search on them within the Twitter search engine, it’s a good idea to put the hash tag in front of any keywords relating to your company or products. For example, here’s a tweet we could have put out.

Looking for #Photography #Services in #Cornwall, contact #DexlaMedia

We’ve hashed a number of keywords here that we feel users could search on. In some respects we’ve gone a little over the top here, so usage of the # tags should mean that you’re not spamming Twitter with keywords, therefore, use them wisely.

I want a link in my Tweet

The Twitter interface allows you to post links, but bear in mind you’ve got 140 characters to get your message, tags and url in so would the following example allow us to do this?

http://www.dexla-media.co.uk/cornwall-web-design/getting-started-on-twitter/

Blimey, this is 76 characters long, so already we’ve gone over half of our limit, not much space to get anything else meaningful in. However, help is at hand as over the past year or so, URL shorteners have become the friend of Social Media. URL shorteners have been around for many years, but their application in services like Twitter means space is freed up.

We use Bit.ly as our preferred service, but there are a number of others we can use. What sold Bit.ly to us was the ability to track the clickthroughs on the links to show us how many people came to any of our articles.

So for our example above, via Bit.ly, we would now see our url as http://bit.ly/bI0L3O

Now we’ve condensed our link down to only 20 characters, a perfect length giving us 120 characters left to play with.

How do I reply to Someone?

In the right hand column on Twitter, you’ll see your Twitter handle there prefixed with the @ symbol, this is a link, which takes you through to a page where you can see who has sent a tweet to you or re-tweeted one of your posts.

It’s good practice to say thank you to anyone who has re-tweeted a post of yours and Twitter gives you the ability via a link (Reply) to do this. This also automatically puts their name into the message body with the @ symbol in place so it shows up in their list.

So using the @ symbol is a great way to enable your followers to click on that persons name to see their Twitter account.

I like this post, how do I let my followers know about it?

This is where re-tweeting comes into play, this is the ability to pass on a tweet to your followers. Twitter has an option to re-tweet a tweet automatically to your followers via a link, but this doesn’t give you much control over the content.

Before Twitter introduced this automatic forwarding, it became common practice to copy and paste the tweet into the message body and prefix the message with the letters RT

This is still possible to do, consider the following RT example

RT @dexlamedia – Great article on Depth of Field in #Photography http://bit.ly/bI0L3O <- A Must Read!!

Our original tweet would have been

@dexlamedia – Great article on Depth of Field in #Photography http://bit.ly/bI0L3O

And here we have copied and pasted it and put RT at the beginning

RT @dexlamedia – Great article on Depth of Field in #Photography http://bit.ly/bI0L3O

But we still haven’t reached the 140 character limit, so lets give our followers the incentive to click the link

<- A Must Read!!

Via Twitter’s automatic retweet link, we couldn’t add our stamp of approval, so to earn kudos on re-tweets, think about this approach.

If you don’t want to use RT, another way is to copy and paste the tweet, but put the Twitter name at the end and use the via tag as in this example

A Must Read Article! – Great article on Depth of Field in #Photography http://bit.ly/bI0L3O (via @dexlamedia)

Adding their Twitter handle shows you care and shows credit where credit is due.

That covers the basics for effective messaging on Twitter, our next article will look at how often we should tweet ourselves and what should we tweet about.

If you’re a keen fan of Dexla Media, why not also follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we’re on there and are actively looking to engage and network with new clients.