Study the following tweet for a moment.

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There are a lot of different things we do on Twitter. Some we do more than others. We converse once in a while. We help others on occasion and we post links… a lot.

The other day, my friend Carol wanted some help from her tweeps. She has been using Twitter for quite a while and made a mistake a lot of us make from time to time. She was a bit too wordy with one of her tweets. That’s okay most of the time, but when we want someone to retweet our message, that can become a problem. Wordiness can lead to having words cut off the end of our tweets.

If the last ten to twenty characters in a tweet are part of a link, that link may be cut off. How much is cut off may depend on your Twitter client. I use Hootsuite and when I clicked the retweet button (I use traditional Retweets) to send her tweet to my followers, the above tweet was sent.

Wait a minute!!! None of my followers were able to vote on her manuscript because in my retweet the link was cut off. Of course, this can be remedied by simply retweeting her entire tweet to my stream. Hootsuite gives users a choice to RT complete tweets but I and many others choose to do things the old fashioned way (RT@username then body of the tweet).

I edited Carol’s tweet without being solicited to do so, and she sent it off once again to her followers. Moments later I was reminded that when you help someone, even in the smallest of ways, they usually say thank you.

Follow @cekster, a great picture book writer

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Have you ever cut off your own links in tweets or made any other Twitter blunders? Let me know in the comments section below and please
follow me on Twitter.

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