If you want to publish an effective tweet you should set a limit of less than 140 characters and here is why.
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What is an Effective Tweet?
An effective tweet is one that would generate an engagement with your community (Getting retweeted and receiving replies etc.).
In a ReTweet, a certain number of characters is added and this is what users don’t account for.
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What Are Those Additional Characters?
Well, there is the “RT” symbol, 2 “spaces”, a colon and most importantly your Twitter handle (e.g. @JadRahme). So, for example, when someone retweet one of my tweets there are 14 characters added automatically: “RT @JadRahme: “. This means that if I write a tweet with more than 126 characters, it is not “retweetable” and therefore it is not an effective tweet.
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What Happens if You go Over Your “Effective Character Limit”?
There are three possible options for the user willing to retweet your ineffective tweet: Some of them will just give up and not RT, some others will share a shortened tweet (characters exceeding the 140-limit are replaced by “…”) and others will decide to cut off words. You don’t want to be victim of any of those three scenarios! And for those of you would argue that the last option is not so bad, here is an example showing that it is:
Once, I wanted to retweet a tweet published by @LBC_Group (A Lebanese TV Station) but it exceeded the “effective character limit” so I had to remove the last part of the tweet saying “A follow-up on the story,in tonight’s bulletin”. This short sentence that is useless for me since I just want to share the info, is crucial to the broadcasting group which main objective in social media is driving people to watch its news bulletin on TV.
The man who beat up the Ethiopian worker infront of her embassy was identified as Ali Mahfouz.A follow-up on the story,in tonight's bulletin
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LBCI TV (@LBC_Group) March 09, 2012
The man who beat up the Ethiopian worker infront of her embassy was identified as Ali Mahfouz.A follow-up on the story,in tonight's bulletin
—LBCI TV (@LBC_Group) March 09, 2012
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How to Calculate Your “Effective Character Limit”?
The “Effective Character Limit” Formula = 140 – (6+ characters in your handle)
Explanation:
140 = Twitter Character Limit
6 = 2 (RT) + 1 (Space) + 1 (@) + 1 (:) + 1 (Space)
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What About Native Retweets?
Native Retweet: “This is Twitter’s official method of passing along information, by simply recreating the original tweet, unaltered, to your followers. This has the journalistic advantage of keeping the name and avatar of the original poster attached to the words, while subtly noting that you were the retweeter.” (Sonderman, 2011). This will definitely solve the character limit problem but, I should note that this feature is not available on all the platforms and clients and not all the Twitter users are aware of its existence. Therefore, to maximize your efficiency and be on the safe side you should stick to your “Effective Character Limit”.
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you have given this a lot of thought… i usually click retweet without any calculations
Indeed I thought a lot about this concept before writing about it. Here I have a question for you: How do you usually retweet? A native retweet on twitter.com? Or a retweet where the “RT @xxx: ” is added?
Very helpful tip indeed
Glad you liked it
I was thinking about the same thing today …. Thnx a lot very informative
Cool
Glad you liked the post!
Depends on what I’m using to tweet and what the tweet is.
If I want to add a quick two cents then I’ll do the RT @___, but if it’s a joke/quote/some sort of statement which I want to share and not really add a comment… I’ll go with the retweet button.
Definitely agree Aline
To be on the safe side always consider your Twitter Effective Character Limit…
This represents the biggest problem we have in psychology and therapy today. People are talking more and more in tweets and are afraid of, their message is too long. But what really happen internal in this kind of short telegram style conversation? By only using the surface structure in our language, we have to delete information, generalize and distort the most important of what we like to say. The receiver will catch this short version and fill up what is lacking with own pieces of information – own beliefs – own representations of this issue and the misunderstandings are preprogrammed and predictable. This is happen every single day around the world. With the partner, with the kids, on work, whilst shopping, with friends, the landlord, neighbors etc.
We have a clear picture inside our head what we want or would like to say – we then tell in short sentence our thoughts (140 characters) – but the people sometimes totally misunderstand us… Why?
Because we never have time enough to reach the deep structure of our language, always just the surface – and the receiver will take the chance to interpreters what is lacking – on his /her own way. In other words: When we only use short sentences, we loose the control of our words and give the receiver ability to mix his /her own cocktail with quiet opposite meaning.
So, practicing communication like on Twitter – you will experience: The Structure of Misunderstandings….!
Very interesting psychological point of view Gerrith! Thanks for sharing your opinion