Why it Really is 120 Characters

Tonight I can give you the perfect example of why brevity and clarity are essential in communications; but on Twitter, it's brevity. Just because Twitter gives you 140 characters, doesn't mean you should use them. Especially if you want to have your message repeated accurately.

Why? You need room for the RT and your Twitter handle.

I cannot take credit for this idea, kudos to Ron Harlan from last year's NAB convention.

Here's your real-time example. Knowing that our junior quarterback was declaring for the NFL tonight, and our football media relations director wanted a 7 p.m. press release on the website, I crafted the following supporting tweet:

Please see main Razorback website for statements from Ryan Mallett and Bobby Petrino http://bit.ly/hu87SI

That's 115 characters, including the shortened URL.

Tonight, I've seen almost as many fans with this message:

RT @ArkRazorbacks Please see main Razorback website for statements from Ryan Mallett and Bobby Petrino http://bit.ly/hu87SI

Even leaves a few characters for them to get credit if they have a short handle when their friends retweet.

If I had put "University of Arkansas" or "football" or other extraneous words in the tweet, I risk A) clipping on the URL at the end or B) people editing the retweet.

Why do I care about the retweet? Reverse distribution network.

Yes, we want our media to put out the word, but we recognize that friends go to friends directly. Adding this secondary mechanism of distributing messages -- from the audience to the audience members (thus the reverse distribution, rather than media distribution).

In the first hour after the release, we are about even of media tweets in our area, who of course will for the most part reformat our tweet or media release to have it coming from their feeds, as we have twitter fans of the Razorbacks retweeting. Yes, the media is likely followed by more people than the combined fans, but as time goes on, the chance that more fans will repeat our message to their fans makes for the probability that the eventual the total reached by reverse distribution could exceed (or at least equal) the media.

The same thing about keeping it short applies to SMS text systems and Facebook (esp on FB which teases you with the ability have 450 characters but it really only displays around 120 before the truncation).