Perfecting the Twitter Headline

Whoever said that microblogging is for lazy writers has got it wrong. True enough, Twitter only lets you write 140 characters or so, but this limitation actually forces one to be more creative with what you write.

When you write a full-length 300-word blog post, you can take all the liberties you want in order to get your point across. You can post a photo, you can post bullet points, or you can even embed videos. With Twitter (among others), it’s just those 140 characters–not even enough for a full paragraph!

And so, just like writing an effective headline, it takes mastery to get that effective, attention-grabbing tweet done.

Use attractive adjectives

If you read a headline that says Awesome, or Amazing or Great, then that would surely get your interest, won’t it? How about Interesting or Mind boggling? Using these adjectives on a tweet would surely attract the interest of your friends, or even people casually browsing your tweet, especially if that person is interested in the topic that you’re tweeting about.

For instance, if you have a science blog, and you post something about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, you can tweet and link to it with something like this: “Awesome pics of the CERN LHC. A physics junkie’s dream come true!”

Be sure to back up your awesome headline with awesome content or pictures, thoughh!

Use hashtags

A lot of people come across your tweets not because they’re your friends. Some would be doing searches for certain keywords. One way by which you can add tags to your tweets is through hashtags, or the # symbol, followed by the keyword.

Say, you’re tweeting about cars, you can add #cars. Or you can even be more specific by adding #cars #suv. This makes it easier for people searching for SUVs to stumble your tweet.

So, you can say “Just filled up my #suv’s tank. Boy, #gas prices are high these days.” And then you can link to your blog post describing your story spending big bucks on a full tank.

Use URL shortening services

Twitter’s character limitation is definitely very limiting if you plan to insert URLs to your blog posts. Fortunately, there are a handful of URL shortening services out there that convert something as long as a hundred characters or more into a tiny URL with just about 10 characters or less.

You can check out tinyurl.com, bit.ly, is.gd or other services. They basically give you the same functionality, but some, like TinyURL, would let you customize the name that comes after tinyurl.com/, so you can better remember a URL if you plan to use it elsewhere.

These services would let people click on the short URL and they would be redirected to the original source. Just be sure to use the more respected and reputable URL shortening services, as some fly-by-night ones might lead you to malware sites instead.

A good Twitter headline is short, sweet and interesting. Keep it that way, and people will keep following you, and they will most likely click on links in your tweets.