Twitter is a phenomenal platform for promoting your author brand. With one tweet, you can quickly and easily distribute important information and update your followers. But when you’re limited to Twitter’s 280 characters, how can you possibly inform, engage, and ultimately convert your followers into active fans?
The key is to keep your tweets concise, precise, and interesting. Let’s take a look at five tricks to pack big results into shorter tweets!
Here Are 5 Tricks To Get Big Results With Shorter Tweets:
1. Shorten your links — Twitter is great for driving traffic to your website or sales page. But the long URLs can eat up your character count, leaving no space for your message. A smart solution is to use a link-shortening service such as bit.ly. Not only will bit.ly reduce the characters in your URL, it will even provide tracking information so you can determine whether or not your tweets are effectively driving traffic.
2. Put hashtags in your tweet copy — Hashtags are a great way to increase the visibility of your tweets. However, don’t consign your hashtags to the end of your tweet, or they may strike readers as superfluous. Instead, use hashtags as part of your tweet copy.
For example, shorten your tweet by writing, “Regular and casual #readers alike will love my new #book” as opposed to “Regular and casual readers alike will love my new book. #readers #book.”
3. Use strong verbs — Since tweets can be used to drive traffic to your website, there should be a distinct and powerful call to action. By using strong verbs in your message, you motivate your followers to take action—and you’ll save on characters by eliminating unnecessary words.
For example, “Read my latest short story here!” works much better than “My latest short story was posted here, so perhaps you might consider reading it.”
4. Use acronyms — As writers, most of us prefer to see English written properly and in complete sentences. But there’s no denying that the Internet has resulted in “social shorthand,” increasing the use of abbreviations and acronyms. On Twitter, it’s especially important to be as succinct as possible—just be sure that your tweet is carefully crafted and doesn’t appear to be full of typos. Stick to the ever-growing list of acceptable acronyms by the online community. Otherwise your followers might reply with “SMH, what does that mean?”
5. Stay on message — This should come as no surprise, but the key to keeping anyone engaged is to stay on message. While it may seem impossible to wander off topic in a tweet, take our word for it; we’ve seen it happen many times. Narrow your focus while writing your tweets so that you don’t attempt to cover too much information at once. For example, if you’re posting tweets about your latest bout of writer’s block, don’t include random links to movie reviews or non sequiturs about your pets. You don’t want your followers distracted and leaving to visit other unrelated sites.
Tweets are more than just 280-character quips about your latest escapades. They are excellent ways to communicate information about your brand to a global audience. So the next time you tweet about your book sales or latest publication, remember to keep it short, keep it sweet, and keep them wanting more.
Photo by eldh
QUESTION: How do you keep your tweets short?
Excellent tips.
Letting you know the character count for tweets was increased quite some time ago; please edit the following sentence: “Tweets are more than just 140-character quips about your latest escapades.”
Hi Francesca,
Thank you for pointing this out. We have updated the article to reflect the increased number of tweets.