How to design tweets that are loved by all & re-tweeted around

Design tweets ? What does that mean Mani ?
If that’s what you’re asking, okay.. let me explain.

You get tweeted about all sorts of interesting things on twitter right ?
Its a fact that not all of us will re-tweet everything interesting we find. We are selective about what we re-tweet, just like how selective we are about our friends.

But the reality is that even though its you who chooses to re-tweet a story/tweet, you are being forced to re-tweet that piece by someone else, unknowingly or not.

You are a mere puppet who does the job fine, and is made to believe that you did a great job. Don’t get me wrong, but its a truth. Its nothing wrong here, in fact we do this in agreement with our selves.
When you see an interesting tweet on your timeline, there are a few questions that come to your mind automatically, that gets answered immediately and in a jiffy compels you to push the re-tweet button.

Let me visualize the process for you.

The important thing is that all the processes gets executed under 2-3 seconds or less.

For instance, when you see an article from someone, lets say @mashable, the Question – Answer Time Spent Ratio is very minimal. In fact, this is the success secret of any successful story.

Some stories/tweets are so good that they give you answers even before you ask the questions. So whover manages to foresee the questions and “design” the tweets accordingly will score a very high mark in the Question – Answer Time Spent Ratio, which will give them successful tweets that are loved by all.

Let’s look at the factors that will help us make the “Question – Answer Time Spent Ratio” as minimal as possible, giving us re-tweetable posts.

1. Give the reader more than one good reason to re-tweet you

Always, ask the question… “So ?” at the end of every tweet that you’d expect people to love and re-tweet.
Let’s say you tweet about the 10 Good WordPress themes you saw the other day. You think those ten themes are awesome but do you think others will re-tweet it ?
No. The story is stale, as all of them would’ve seen more than enough of such lists. So you fail to give them a reason. A better story would be “The 101 WordPress themes with 100% valid CSS/XHTML markups”. Better right ?

2. Keep things simple and to-the-point

Don’t want to sound cliche here, but keeping things crisp and simple is something you got to learn from the masters. You got to have skills of a copywriter to do this, and I agree it isn’t easy. Here, instead of focusing on what to write, a better strategy would be write as blunt as you can and then start chopping off the frills from it. Make it short and sweet and to the point. All great tweeters keep this as a thumb rule.

3. Be a critic, judge your tweet from the reader’s perspective

This is a simple trick. Instead of being the writer, be the reader. Imagine how many tweets he would be looking at the moment, how many he’d be voting and how many he’d be dropping from his radar. Don’t go soft on your tweet. Be a critic, find out whether you’d re-tweet the story if you were the reader. If you really think that your tweet is a winner, go right ahead with it. Most probably it would be one.

4. Add value to your tweets. Package them well

I don’t mean to say you’ve to do this directly like immediate benefits, but indirect benefits. You know when you add a “value perspective” to tweets, even the normal tweets become the best one. Ex: A normal tweet would be something like – “Free wordpress themes – url here”
A value added tweet would be – “Just found this amazing website where every WP theme is free, and they add one daily too – url here”

5. Make them friendly and casual as possible and don’t sound like a machine

Nobody likes to read machine language, even if they did, they wouldn’t love it for long, as it get’s boring. The best way is to make your tweets friendly as possible. It only adds a lot of positivity to the tweets. If the tweet article is stale, your followers would carelessly laugh it off or wouldn’t even bother, but if they find it interesting, they’d immediately share it with you and others. While had it been a boring tweet with no friendly angle to it, people would remember it, and add it up to your reputation, which wouldn’t do any good. So adding a little bit of fun and friendliness to your tweets will only do good. Wait a minute..am I not sounding like a robot..adding friendliness ? (Like pepper and salt? ) Doesn’t make sense. ‘Nuff said. I leave it to you to guess.

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