Conversations in 140 characters

twitterA recent presentation to “Broadband for Seniors” tutors on “What you need to know about Twitter” brought forth the question

How can we possibly keep a tweet to 140 characters? Why cant twitter increase the number of characters?

and some of the responses from participants:

  • putting your message in so few words is tricky
  • putting yourself across succinctly takes practice but is good for your English!  (Rasa)
  • If you have to do all this to get beyond the 140 limit, why dont twitter just expand the 140 limit?
  • then it will become toooo much – the treat of it is its only 140 – short and sharp !!!140 characters – sweet and short (Megan)

Here are some tips for keeping within the 140 character limit:

  • Consider a short username/id/twitter handle if people reply to you or retweet one of your tweets it will not use up too many characters
  • Keep your sentence short, concise and to the poin
  • Use recognized abbreviations eg Ss and Ts for students and teachers. Rasa suggested searching online for twitter and facebook abbreviations
  • Use pictures to show what the tweet is about
  • Add short videos for depth See

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • Use a url shortener like bitly, moourl, tinyurl, google etc (although twitter seems  to shortern the url and not include all of it in the character count)
  • Create a poster in canva, a powerpoint slide converted to a jpg to portray a lot of information or other image generator for sharing  eg the 6 or 7 questions to be posed in a twitter chat. They can be displayed on a poster converted to jpg and then attached as an image so that the complete content can be displayed or see tweet below for another example:

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Another question was “what happens if you exceed the 140 characters?” It highlights the characters that over the 140 mark and states how many characters you are over!

What tips and hints do you have to keep conversations within 140 characters?

140 characters

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