107 Social Media | Best Practices of Common Social Media Platforms | Twitter

Twitter Basics

  • Micro-blogging service to post short messages.
  • Length: maximum 280 characters per message.

A diagram showing the anatomy of a tweet

The perfect tweet is:

  • Front loaded. Put the most important words at the start of the tweet to catch a follower’s eye.
  • Scannable. Write simply and concisely. You want followers to “get” it first go.
  • Specific. Make your content valuable and useful. Make it matter to your followers.
  • Active. Use strong verbs and skip the adjectives and adverbs.
  • Focused. Limit yourself to one idea per tweet. The rest can go in a blog post.
  • Compelling. Give followers a reason to click through. Clickbait headlines work for a reason!
  • Short. You may have 280 characters now, but you don’t have to use them all!
  • On brand. Your tweets should sound like you. Re-read to check you’re on brand.

(From Breaking the Internet: How to Write The Perfect Tweet)

Examples of things you can tweet (ref)

  • Questions to invite feedback
  • Interesting news items you’ve found
  • Interesting photographs
  • Replies to other people’s tweets
  • Retweets of other people’s tweets
  • Details of new publications or resources you’ve produced
light bulb iconDeeper Dive
Read Twitter considerations and tips at conferences
6 things to Tweet when attending a conference

Best practices


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