Why You Should Not Tweet Your Headlines
I am starting to feel like a hater when it comes to the NC Times use of social media. I think that they are sitting around in some conference room thinking up new ways to irritate me. However, many people rely on the same tactic used by the NC Times when tweeting. They merely retweet the subject of their post without considering the usefulness or retweetability of their update. Hopefully by pointing out their mistake I can help you improve your tweets and increase your follower count.
Today I received the following tweet on my mobile phone:
First I will break down the incorrect elements of this tweet and then I will put it back together in a form that more suited to social networking.
Problematic elements of the tweet above:
- Useless hashtag: The NC Times should not use a hashtag with their username on all tweets. This is redundant information. The @username construct is more powerful than a hashtag on Twitter. Hashtags are more properly used as subordinate labels.
- Useless geotag: Useless may be incorrect terminology. The REGION: label above is meant to signal who might be interested in this story. Unfortunately Twitter offers no capability to use a label in this format. The more appropriate thing to do would be to use separate Twitter accounts for stories of limited interest and allow people to follow segments of interest.
- Unnecessary words: When this tweet is taken in context, the words brush and camp are not needed. At the time of this tweet it was generally known that there were brush fires on Camp Pendleton. The intent of the story was to provide an update on the fires. The majority of people in the region would understand Pendleton to mean Camp Pendleton.
- Unnecessary punctuation: Both the quotes around the headline and the parenthesis around the shortened URL are not required. These are elements of style more appropriately reserved for formal writing. The parenthesis also include parasitic spaces to separate them from the link.
When we remove the useless and unnecessary elements of the tweet above the tweet goes from 80 characters to 38 characters. We have removed an astounding 52.5% of the tweet.
The measure of success of a tweet is retweetableness. We can compute the maximum size of a tweet based on the following formula:
Therefore @nctimes could be composing tweets up to 127 characters long. This tweet falls well under that limit at 80 characters long. A tweet should not needlessly use that much space, but the second factor to consider is completeness of the content.
Our new 38 character tweet: “fires on Pendleton http://bit.ly/uBG5r” really doesn’t tell us anything that isn’t already known.
Probably the most important information in the article is the danger the fires present. That gives us the following tweet, “Two Pendleton fires pose no threat to structures http://bit.ly/uBG5r”. This new tweet is 68 characters long. Suddenly we have a tweet that actually gives us a status update and it is still shorter than the original.
We could add more details and stay within our optimal length, “SD Sheriff’s helicopters and back fires used to fight two Pendleton fires; no threat to structures http://bit.ly/uBG5r” is 118 characters long and captures most of the important details of the story. This tweet is much more likely to be retweeted.
In business we are looking at social media as a means to drive traffic to web sites or brick and mortar stores to increase sales or advertising revenue. It may seem like a good idea to depend on teaser tweets to get people to click through to your site. This may work occasionally if your content is especially compelling and useful, but in most cases this is not a good strategy. Your strategy should be to provide valuable content and build up an actively listening follower base. Your reward will be brand loyalty due to the enhanced reputation that your social networking presence is providing.
