My worst Twitter Habit
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
by Mark Carras
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My worst Twitter Habit
My worst Twitter habit can also be used as proof at what makes Twitter so cool. It forces you to get to the fricken point! So then you have people like me who love to talk. I am always pushing that 140 character limit to the wall. Why is that so bad? The Re-Tweet. If someone sends a Twitter message that I really like I may want to re-tweet that message. Now if that message is exactly 140 characters, you can’t re-tweet it without doing some serious editing. Now that sounds easy enough, but trying to figure out what to cut out of someone else’s Twitter message can sometimes be pure hell! More times than not when I hit the re-tweet button on my Twhirl application and see that it is over the limit, I just erase and forget about it. They loose the Re-tweet.
So What do you do to make sure your contacts can re-tweet your best stuff? Keep in mind how a re-tweet is done. On Twhirl they have a nice easy RT button. It then spews out the word “Retweeting”, the users name, followed by their original message. The whole thing can take up 20-30 characters. So it would be best to try and keep the message to around 100 characters. Maybe 120 in extreme situations. If your message is any longer it will be impossible to re-tweet.
Now for anyone wondering what the heck a re-tweet is, it is when you resend someone else’s message. This can be done by hand or with one of the many Twitter applications that are available. The best way to do this by hand is to just type “RT” at the beginning of the original message. It is very important though to make sure you include the full user name of the account that sent the original message. This should include the @ symbol before their account name so it becomes a clickable link to their profile. People will get very upset if you don’t give them credit for being the first to post something.
So I know it is hard to keep those messages to 100 characters. As you can see from the title of this blog post it is my worst habit related to Twitter. But getting your messages re-sent by others can more than triple your power on Twitter in seconds. I also must highly recommend that you do resend other peoples messages. If you resend their stuff, you have a greater chance that they will resend your stuff. Feel free to practice by giving me some re-twits. Really I won’t mind.