Twitter is one of the most popular and effective social media platforms for marketing your business and building your company's reputation and following.
However, one does not simply join Twitter and start tweeting away without first calculating a strategy - a social media campaign won't typically become successful unless a plan has been laid out for who you intend to target and how exactly you plan to do it.
As such, you must be sure to craft your 140 characters in a way that communicates your message effectively and succinctly. For instance, MarketingProfs suggests actually laying out a rough draft for your tweet prior to hitting send.
"Granting 'first draft' status to something as short as a tweet might seem odd - but even a veteran tweeter will rarely achieve concise perfection without some refinement," the news source states. At least one rewrite may be necessary in many cases to ensure you're sending the correct message.
Twitter is also about cutting down on unnecessary words or phrases to fit your message within the allotted space. For example, try to find shorter synonyms for longer words - such as "hard" instead of "difficult." The same can be used for discussing time-frames - "last year" will take up more space than "2011." If you find yourself going over the character limit, do a quick once-over of your tweet and you're likely to find at least one instance in which you could shorten or replace a word.
Along those same lines, veteran tweeters have become adept at using abbreviations when necessary. They're a space-saver, sure, but if you're abbreviating too much or using letters that your audience doesn't understand, you could be hurting your cause more than helping it.
Webopedia points out some examples of common Twitter abbreviations, such as using "abt" instead of "about," "bgd" instead of "background" or "TFTF" instead of "thanks for the follow." Try not to get too cute though - using an abbreviation like "HAND" for "have a nice day" will probably be misconstrued by many of your followers.
Finally, MarketingProfs urges users to consider what they learned in English class. Avoid the passive voice, since it reduces the urgency of your statement and "clutters your tweet with needless verbiage." Also, the personal pronoun is often implied in tweets, meaning words such as "that," "which" and "who" are usually unnecessary.