Like many of you, I have dived into the dicey waters of Twitter. How can this thing drive business? How can I avoid this taking over my life? Does anyone pay attention to this thing anyway?
Even though I haven’t been able to answer those questions – along with many others – I have noticed a few lessons that Twitter can teach anyone about successful communication.
Power in Brevity: I have been teaching this lesson from the platform for years. When we have to create a message that can be succinct enough to fit in 140 characters, we must practice extreme editing skills. We all know how effective a sound bite can be. When something is catchy, it gets passed on and becomes viral.
Benefit Statements: It seems as though the tweets that get retweeted the most are the ones that lead with an interesting benefit headline. For example, if I’m linking to an interesting article about public speaking, instead of putting “Cool article on public speaking” I’ll probably put “Learn how to wow audiences with humor”. It’s more likely people will click to that link rather than the first.
Call to Action: One of the reasons why people tweet is to drive traffic to their website. Typically the call to action is to click a link to a site. Of course, there are many other calls to action that can be generated on a tweet, and it seems the most successful tweet have one.
Putting it all together, Twitter can teach us a very simple yet powerful lesson. Any successful message is brief with clear benefits and a call to action. Remember it. Use it.
