Essential Twitter

One of the latest task is coming up with guidelines -- our own digital media stylebook -- for students and interns to follow when operating our feeds. Here's a first installment for comment, that carries the heading of "Essential Twitter."

With 140 characters to say it, economy is important. Punctuation is optional. The AP rules do not apply. That said, the often childish shorthand migrating over from text messaging should be avoided. Repetition should be avoided. And in reality, it should be said in 120 characters.

The choice of the verb in a Tweet is what separates run of the mill texting from genuine real-time reporting. Obviously, there is no room for the passive tense; short active verbs and simple declarative sentences.

Quick shorthand is acceptable. Down and distance in football? 1&10. Time in basketball? 848-2ND or 1348-3Q. Innings? Top 3. Versus? Simple “v” (that’s two characters saved). Start times – 130p, 11a, 4-430p. Other numbers like 10K, 1500m. The character savings here can be used to accurately convey scores, results or times.

Remember the “#” often used for rankings becomes a hash tag in the Twitter world. Unfortunately, this is going to waste characters – No.16 rather than #16.
Speaking of hash tags, employ them for regular events, and be consistent. With a long school name (Arkansas) or a mascot (Razorbacks), know that your natural hash tag labels will be costly to the 120 character overhead. For Arkansas, #gohogs and #hogs are popular with fans. For our own tag searching, we are advocating #WPS (woo pig sooie). It also separates Arkansas tweets from Harley-Davidson fan tweets.

And why only 120 characters? You want to be retweeted, and you want to give those resending your information space for their own RT or via. Make that space for them.