The topic of this post is based on a suggestion from @carlincomm – “101 Reasons that Twitter makes you a better writer. 1-A tweet is a great headline. 2-140 characters builds discipline. 3-more fun”
One of the trickiest parts of marketing is writing concisely – painting a picture of a thousand words with a few eloquent sentences. Whether it’s a one-sentence tagline or a page-long direct mail piece, the ability to fully explain an idea in just a few words is vital to success in the industry. Few marketers that I know are also good writers, and they invest a huge chunk of their time in improving their ability to craft word pictures for their customers. A useful tool that has emerged recently online is Twitter, one of the more popular social networking applications on the web today.
Twitter allows you to send short-format messages to your friends and colleagues (your “followers”) to update them about the goings on of your life and career. People “tweet” about everything from their latest closed sale to the color of the bird on their windowsill. The common thread between these vastly different messages, though, is their length – Twitter restricts your messages to 140 characters.
It might seem trivial, but this hard restriction is forcing many of us to become better writers. While I can’t give you a list of 101 reasons why, here are my top ten reasons Twitter makes you a better writer:
- Writing short messages helps you perfect the art of “headlining”
- Restricting an entire message to just 140 characters builds discipline – you can’t ramble and repeat yourself over and over and over and over and over and …
- Your messages are seen by a potential network of millions of people, an audience that pressures you to be brief, bright, and gone when you’re done
- If your tweets are frequently irrelevant, boring, or difficult to read your audience will dry up quickly – instant feedback
- In many cases, you receive rapid feedback on your copy
- Sometimes it’s more fun to shout out a quick comment than labor over pages of marketing copy
- You quickly learn the cost of a million dollar word – antidisestablishmentarianism is great for Scrabble but horrible for Twitter
- Recording a passing thought in a short message is invaluable in expanding the idea later at your desk
- It often only takes a few words to make ourselves understood, but we’re in the habit of spending paragraphs – Twitter breaks that habit
- Twitter leaves no room for rebuttal in an argument – get your point across the first time, briefly, or your stance probably isn’t as strong as you thought
These are just the first ten reasons I came up with for how Twitter makes you a better writer. What would you add to the list?
11. It trains you how to write for the web, where no one reads your writing
12. Tweets need to be written knowing that your audience can @reply
13. Your messages may be part of a larger theme via #hashtags
14. It may need to be less than 140 characters if you expect viral tweets via RT retweets
However, Twitter as much as twitter might make you a better writer it makes you a poor one. In an effort to shove information into 140 characters
1. Grammar is often ignored
2. Punctuation is left out
3. Words are shortened
4. Since Twitter is SMS based (hence the 140 character limit), lots of SMS-speak works it’s way in: LOL, ROTFL, j/k, etc
3. Structure is skewed to use @replies or #hastags
4. Twitter has @replies, but they aren’t threaded so context is often lost
5. URLs are usually shortened using TinyURL or equiv. There is no contextual link text.
6. It’s still a new technology — usage and terminology isn’t nailed down yet. Are people who use twitter twits or tweeps?
7. As a marketer you may expect control over your message. Twitter (like other social tools) gives you control over the words you write, but not who sees them or their response.
8. Your message quickly gets lost in the stream of Tweets rolling by
9. Marketers need to work on building up a network of people. Takes a lot of work to get legitimate followers
10. Marketers that build a network of followers through spam following or other poor methods get lots of followers quickly, but lose *tons* of respect and risk their account being suspended.
11. (#11, just to top your ten) There is no real way to emphasize words or phrases. No italics, no bold, no underline, no font sizes, no indents, no bullet points.
Fantastic points in your post and Taylor’s comment too.
I train people in writing for the web and it’s so hard to get them to be more brief. (It’s even hard for me to apply that sometimes.) Now that I’m using Twitter and encouraging others to do so for business purposes, maybe we’ll all finally get enough practice at brevity and quickly realize the value too.
Thanks.
It only makes you a better writer if you know how to use the format. I’ve written two serials and around five short flash fiction pieces (under 20 lines) on Twitter (@vstentacles), (@junkdnafiction), (@mopedronin), (@gentlexplorer). People really shine when they are forced to use 140 characters, but only if they know where they are going with it, and can utilize the tools of the Internet simultaneously.
12. You acquire a new Twitter-writing skill and you get to know tweeple of all kinds very quickly and share fun tweeps with them. However, you may become a twitaholic if you overtweet and you may develop a bit of a twego; but overall it is twitterrific.