Have you ever taken a moment to appreciate the high art of a well crafted Tweet?
Twitter? High art? Yes, well designed tweets are elegant little poems that also are both beautiful and functional.
Modern Day Haiku
There is an art and science to crafting an effective tweet. There is a certain joy that comes from the artistic and technical creativity Twitter’s 140 character limit demands.
A well crafted tweet piques interest, provokes an emotion, motivates an action and provides the means for that action. While that is a tall order for a mere 140 characters, and that’s what makes Twitter not only fun, but also a powerful branding tool.
Confines Create Clarity
The 140 character count is an excellent tool for brand development. If you can’t make your point in 140 characters or less you are not clear on your point.
The limitations of a tweet allows for only one call to action or one talking point. The acceptability of posting the same content multiple times balances that limitation. If your message has 5 different talking points, each is distilled into heat seeking message missiles for different audience segments.
Stir Emotion
What is poetry but the song of the soul? Yes, getting a little poetic there. The power of poetry is that it evokes emotion. Great tweets are like little poems, they stir emotion. Emotions are what drive action, a click on the link, a retweet, a comment.
Tweets, like haiku, allow for only a very small container to delight, incite, or sadden. Just like with the discipline the ancient diminutive poems command, every word must be intentional and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.
The Artful Hashtag
The Twittersphere is a big online cocktail party. Hashtags are the tools for finding and joining the different conversations. Used correctly they can deliver your message to the right conversation. Used incorrectly they can turn your tweet into “that guy” at the cocktail party.
Hashtags are like spices for tweets. Used sparingly they can enhance the flavor & engagement. Too much and they can render a tweet as unpalatable as a dish that sears the taste buds on the first bite.
Connect the Dots
Tweets have more of a burden than a haiku poem. The poem has completed it’s task when the reader smiles, or pauses to think on a different perspective. In business a tweet is expected to deliver an ROI.
Too often I see businesses wasting well crafted tweets on dead end links – landing sites that provide no value to the user or completely fail to generate the next step of brand engagement or completion of engagement building action. And too often the team fails to see this breakdown and thinks the problem is with Twitter.
Twitter haiku is a a learnable skill, Once you learn the art and science of crafting effective tweets you’ll soon love the artistry of this modern day wordplay.
photo: flickr