Is there such a thing?

Did you know there is such a thing as an ideal length for a twitter message (aka a “tweet”)?

Social networking site Twitter.com asks “what are you doing?” and allows users a maximum of 140 characters to respond (it was designed to be a single location where you could see the equivalent of everyone’s away message).

What is not surprising to me is that Hubspot research shows that a massive number of tweets utilize all 140 characters of the message limit:

If everyone jumped off a cliff would you?

Probably, but you shouldn’t. If everyone used 140 characters to tweet, would you? Probably, but you shouldn’t. How many should you use? Try to cut yourself off at 120 characters because anything longer makes it difficult for anyone to retweet you (publicly forward what you tweeted, short handed as “RT” on Twitter).

If you limit people from retweeting what you tweeted, you end up with poor summaries of what you said or an alteration that could change the meaning or WORSE could end up with someone annoyed that they can’t simply RT you and they move on without doing it.

Add value and keep it short

With only 1.44% of all tweets being retweets, it takes some work to add enough value to the online conversation that someone feels called to quote you. For a company, retweeting is the golden ticket- seeing RTs of your current special or a link to your recent blog article is great because you’ve mobilized the crowd to essentially speak on behalf.

So by adding enough value to be retweetable and keeping your messages under 120 characters, you may hit the Twitter sweet spot!

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