Tweet Like a Ninja: 10 Life-Changing Twitter Hacks

Twitter is notorious for its 140-character limit; you either love or hate it. If you fall into the latter category, you may have gotten giddy with the announcement that the platform was thinking about increasing the limit to 280. Alas, it didn’t pan out. So, we are left with the daunting task of fitting our expansive thoughts into a measly 140 characters.

The good news is, we have come up with 10 tips and tricks to help you get your character count down to the target zone. Some of these may be no-brainers, but others may just change your life. And no, we’re not prone to exaggeration.

1. Need to shave off two characters? Change any “and” into an ampersand (“&”).
2. Refrain from spelling out numbers and just use the number itself, so, for example it appears as “7” instead of “seven.”
3. Add in any tags (@), hashtags (#) and links first, and then build your tweet around them. These are character counts you can’t change, so by adding them in first, you see how many characters you have left to work with.

   
    

4. Use emojis in place of words. For example, you can take “Wow this corn is the bomb!” to
   
   
    
5. Contractions are your friends; use them. 
6. If needed, you can lose the period at the end of a tweet (and/or consider dropping any other unnecessary punctuation).
7. Contrary to popular belief, shorthand is more than accepted on this platform, so embrace it! Here are four of our faves (actually five, because “fave”!)
   1. FB = Facebook
   2. bc = because
   3. Tbt = throwback Thursday
   4. w/ and w/out = with and without

8. Have something important going on, but don’t want to tweet about it every day? You can pin it to your profile. That way, anytime someone goes to your profile, they will see it at the top.

   
    

9. Quote tweet. If you see something you like that someone has already tweeted, quote tweet it and add your ideas without wasting characters on what they have already stated.

   
    

10. Still struggling to shorten your tweet? Here are four hacks:
    1. Write out your longer tweet in a note or word doc, screenshot it and then upload it as an image for your tweet.

       
        

    2. Write your thoughts in a blog, and then link to that blog in your tweet.

       
        

    3. Start a thread. This is where you reply to your own tweet with the rest of your thought.

       
        

    4. Write it as a Facebook or Instagram post and share it to Twitter. Your post will be truncated in the tweet, but there will be a link to the full post.

       ​

Hopefully, these tips will help you squeeze more greatness into every tiny tweet. Remember brevity is key on this platform, so the shorter, the better. Now go out there and impress us all with your 140-character snippets of epic brilliance.