AJ Vaynerchuk

Introduction

A lot of times the only way you can communicate with an individual is via twitter. Sometimes when you want to communicate with this individual you don’t want to use an @reply so you choose to go with a direct message. Keeping up with this hypothetical situation, you only want to send this individual one direct message, rather than multiple DM’s that all revolved around the same topic. Here are some great tips for optimizing your 140 characters.

Kick the Habit of Adding a Space After Periods

Sure it’s bad grammar, but this is Twitter not college. If you rid yourself of the habit of spacing after sentences you will be able to pick up an additional character or two.

Example A (The Wrong Way) - “Hey quick question. What is your plan for tonight? I really want to do something!”

Example B (The Right Way) - “Hey quick question.What is your plan for tonight?I really want to do something!”

Savings: 2 characters.

Use Contractions

Again, this isn’t what your college professor would want to see when you are handing in a research paper, but contractions can save you some valuable characters.

Example A (The Wrong Way) - “Hey quick question.What is your plan for tonight?I really want to do something!”

Example B (The Right Way) - “Hey quick question.What’s your plan for tonight?I really want to do something!”

What we did there was turn “What is” to “What’s”

Savings in this example: 1 character.

Get rid of unnecessary adjectives

This is an important one! If you can rid yourself of unnecessary adjectives you can save a ton of characters.

Example A (The Wrong Way) - “Hey quick question.What’s your plan for tonight?I really want to do something!”

Example B (The Right Way) - “Hey question.What’s your plan for tonight?I want to do something!”

What we did there was rid ourselves of the words “quick” and “really.” Interestingly enough, this is something a professor would probably like to see.

Savings in this example: 13 characters

Turn Your Words Into Numbers

I know this isn’t very nice on the eyes, but it sure is an effective way to save a character or two when you most need them.

Example A (The Wrong Way) - “Hey question.What’s your plan for tonight?I want to do something!”

Example B (The Right Way) - “Hey question.What’s your plan 4 tonight?I want 2 do something!”

What we did there was change the word for to “4″ and the word to, to “2.”

Savings in this example: 3 characters

Get Rid of the Punctuation at the End

The message is capped at 140 characters, so it is safe to assume that the reader of your message will know when you are finished.

Example A (The Wrong Way) - “Hey question.What’s your plan 4 tonight?I want 2 do something!”

Example B (The Right Way) - “Hey question.What’s your plan 4 tonight?I want 2 do something”

What we did there was rid ourselves of the exclamation point at the end of our message. Again, it is unnecessary for the nature of this direct message.

Savings in this example: 1 character

Conclusion

By using the methods above we were able to save 19 characters on our direct message. Sure, the example I used was trivial, but I think it illustrates the point. Hopefully these little tips and tricks will give you the ability to say what you want in one simple, clean message.

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