ChandlerUnified School District

Writing Your Own Tweet

Once you're ready to write your own Tweet, there are a few things to keep in mind. Twitter famously limits the number of characters in each Tweet to 140, so you need to keep things short and concise. A lot of people will abbreviate on Twitter to get their point across in fewer characters, and you should feel free to do that, too. You might even want to keep your Tweet closer to 100-120 characters so others can Retweet you and have room to add their own comments.

When possible, try to use pictures in your Tweets. These will add more context to your Tweets and draw more attention to them, as well. When you add a picture to a Tweet, it is automatically uploaded to the Internet and included as a URL in your Tweet.

You also want to be sure to use hashtags and mentions when appropriate. Hashtags start with the # symbol, and can be used to categorize your Tweets, indicate the key points of your Tweets, or group them together with other similar Tweets. Mentions start with the @ symbol, and are a way to include other Twitter users in your Tweets.

In the Tweet below, Jeff Delp at Willis JHS Tweeted about the Willis Firebots Robotics Club, and used a great combination of pictures, hashtags, and mentions. In the body of the Tweet, he used the hashtags #VEX and #Robotics to highlight the main topics of the Tweet and to make his Tweet come up when people search for Tweets about these topics. He mentioned @ChandlerUnified in his Tweet to indicate that Willis is a school in CUSD, but this also notifies the CUSD Twitter account of his post so they can Retweet it themselves. He closed the Tweet with the hashtag #wjhsstory, which is what most of his Tweets include. This gives Willis JHS a "brand" on Twitter, and encouraging other people who Tweet about Willis to use this hashtag means that the entire community can Tweet and contribute to the "Willis story." The picture of the Firebots makes the Tweet much more interesting and engaging!