Composing a New Tweet

Ideas on what/how to tweet

On one level this is a silly topic, because obviously you are free to put out any content that you like! However this can be a challenge, when you are starting out, wondering what to say.

However, here are some general tips which you may find helpful.

• Firstly, when you first start out, tweet/ retweet something. Some things you tweet will disappear into the ether, unnoticed. See what gets a response  - like, comment, retweet (RT) - and try to establish why that tweet got a response. This will help you refine what you put out, to be more regularly interesting, to those who read you.
• I also recommend, when you are new, tweet something original. As can be seen, one increasing hazard, on Twitter, is trolls and bots accounts and these are often identified, by having little bio information and very few original tweets - more often a few retweets. As people wise up to bots, etc., they will increasingly scrutinise your account before following you and a challenge, if you are new, is that ,with few followers and few tweets, you need to stand out from trolls and bots accounts, which will look very similar.
• Having a few personalised tweets that you composed yourself is a positive indicator that you are a genuine account (the Turing Test!), so these tweets have some value, even if they are ignored, when you send them out. They will be useful when people look at your profile.
• People follow accounts because they find them interesting, so what you put out should, ideall,y add something to the online debate. One way you can apply this is to RT with additional comment (sometimes called “quote tweeting”), rather than just RT. If you only RT, then you may interest people, if you are the first or only person to do so but, if you are the 50th person to RT that tweet, without comment, then you are simply a message relayer. (Look at the abuse Laura Kuenssberg gets for tweeting government comment, without any filter). If you can’t add to a Tweet, then, by all means, occasionally RT without comment but, if you can add a new slant or comment, it increases the value of what you provide to your readers. So experiment with trying to do this.
• Be punchy and attention grabbing. Attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter. Arguably Twitter helps to exacerbate this, so your tweet should grab people’s attention, from the word go. Again, look at tweets that grabbed your attention and ask yourself what made them so compelling. Practise doing the same in your own tweets.
• BE GENEROUS!! When you have been on Twitter for a while you will soon begin to spot that there are some very selfish users an,d also, some generous ones. It has been found that being generous builds trust. Examples of generosity would be retweeting appeals for missing people/ lost items/ people looking for jobs. Occasionally you will see tweets from strangers, who have just been declared in remission from cancer or finished their degree, passed their driving test, etc. It costs you little to spend a few seconds passing on good wishes. I started doing this just for the sake of it but it seems that you get something back too.
• In short, BE INTERESTING!