How To Maximize Twitter’s Character Count

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Among the social media platform trifecta Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Twitter is easily the most frustrating one to use—not only for ordinary users like me who want to elaborate each thought and paint a picture with words as accurate as I can, but for online marketing agencies as well who utilize Twitter’s micro blogging feature to promote their services and products online. Fact is, the designation called “micro blogging” did not make so much waves and impact on the online society until Twitter exploded with users.

So just how are you, an online marketing agency going to have a successful viral marketing campaign if Twitter’s character count limits you to a mere 140 characters or less? You cannot possibly say all there is to your product and services with that paltry character count.

But fortunately for you, dear online marketer, we have collected several ways that you can maximize this rather limited character count offered by a miserly social media platform. So if you find yourself stuck at editing and re-editing a single tweet to fit the totality of your marketing campaign or blurb, then read on as these various tips may aid you in taking full advantage of Twitter’s rather restricted character count.

USE COMMON ABBREVIATIONS

Though this is something most writers are placed in the cross hairs of their readers, it is rather practical for a marketing campaign. Simply typing “RT” instead of “retweet” can easily save you more characters, “with” replaced with “w/”. They are not pleasing to look at but they are practical. Just steer clear from using “u” instead of “you” though as this will make you sound less professional.

SUBSTITUTE NUMBERS FOR WORDS

Pretty straightforward and it saves you characters. “Four” becomes 4 and etc.

DROP UNNECESSARY ARTICLES AND PRONOUNS

Consider words like “that” and “the” as a superfluity and convert your sentences to shorter ones by rephrasing them without the articles and the pronouns.

USE THE SYMBOL COUNTERPART OF SOME WORDS

This is often overlooked but it is one of the easiest ways to save on character count. Just substitute your “and” with an ampersand, your plus to a “+” sign.

THE THESAURUS IS YOUR FRIEND. FIND SYNONYMOUS SHORTER WORDS

Pick an alternative to an excessively long word in your tweet. Most especially if you notice that the word is taking up most of your character count. Utilize the thesaurus and discover better and shorter alternatives there.

OMIT THE VOWELS FROM YOUR WORDS

This might put you in a tight spot considering that you would want to sound professional but are constrained by the limited word count. However, most of your followers can very well follow what you are trying to convey despite you dropping some vowels. Say for an example, “text” becomes “txt”, “source” becomes “src”. Be careful in shortening your words though and make sure that when you do omit vowels, they are still understandable. Some words are not exactly conducive to this technique so watch out for those.

USE CONTRACTIONS WHEN POSSIBLE

Character count becomes significantly sufficient once you make sure that you do not have any words that could otherwise be contracted. Words such as “cannot” can be shortened to “can’t” and “will not” to “won’t” and so on.

If you are still having trouble with the character count perhaps you should rephrase your entire tweet to include only the most important aspects of what you are marketing for. Omitting vowels from words and using common abbreviations might be some of the less sophisticated techniques but utilize them as a last resort so as you can fully maximize your character count.

One last bonus tip would be to keep your tweets short and simple but make sure they do offer valuable and compelling information that would help your cause.