Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:00 pm

Those of our readers that use Twitter may have heard us mention the lengths of tweets before and may even have seen us tweet about it in the past.

We know that technically tweets can be a maximum of 140 characters but have you thought that the way to get your tweets in front of people that are not following you is to have people that are retweet your “pearls of wisdom”?  Just think, we have around 700 followers so a typical tweet might be considered to have a reach of 700 people (assuming that you don’t use hashtags – something that we will cover in a later blog post).  Now then, if each of our followers has 500 followers and you manage to get each of your followers to retweet to their followers the reach increases to 350,000 people – we know that that’s not very likely to happen but the gist of this article is to suggest ways to make it easier for your followers to do this.

The first thing you need to think about is “is my tweet interesting or useful” – we have all seen the “I am having a coffee at …” kinds of tweets and these are not going to help you get retweeted.  An interesting tweet is often one that shares something useful in your market and more often than not has a link to a website (not always you own site).

As we mentioned above, a tweet has a 140 character maximum, this includes what ever you have to say as well as any links you want to include.  To improve the chances of getting retweets you need to leave enough space for your name to be included in the retweet (when someone retweets us for example RT @forestsoftware gets added to the original tweet).

Another tip is not to put any links at the end of the tweet as this means they are less likely to be cut off if someone does retweet something you have said.

Listed below are 7 tips on how to tweet in less than 120 characters :-

1. Keep a count – remember that spaces and punctuation also count as characters so remove that full stop at the end of the tweet.
2. Shorten links using a service such as bit.ly  Having said that, remember that sometimes you might want to have a full link for branding purposes.
3. Shorten words where possible (use & rather than “and” or “I’ll” rather than “I will” for example)m  Don’t use text speak in business related tweets though as this looks unprofessional – compare  “u need to check tweets b4 u send them” with “you need to check tweets before you send them”
4. Use numbers where possible – “Seven tips for successful tweeting” could be rewritten as “7 tips for successful tweeting” for example.
5. Use hashtags sparingly, these can widen your reach but make sure that the tweet is retweetable first.
6. Get rid of extra words that are just “padding” – if you write down the tweet and edit it you will soon get into the swing of being concise when tweeting.
7. Use the “number of characters” in Word or the “LEN” function in Excel to check the number of characters, although if you use a tool such as TweetDeck this will give you the character count automatically.

As someone that manages twitter accounts I often comes across tweets that I feel would be useful to followers but decide that it would take too long to edit the original tweet to be able to reduce the number of characters and still make sense.  I’m then left with two options, the first is to just ignore the tweet altogether and the second is to create a new tweet and not acknowledge the original tweeter