Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal posted this bit of breaking news on Twitter:
The Journal, like some other news organizations, uses a popular service called Twitterfeed to automatically generate tweets based on an RSS feed. Normally, I’m all in favor of automation that saves time and effort, but Twitter is one place where automation usually doesn’t work, especially for news.
A much better strategy is to manually write or edit your tweets to make sure they’ll fit on Twitter. You only have 140 characters total to work with, including spaces and links, after all. This not only allows you to make the length work, but also to add powerful context like hashtags.
If you must automate your tweets, I recommend limiting the length of your text to 100 characters. This leaves room for the auto-generated link, and also for proper attribution to you when people retweet your news (which you really want them to do).
Thanks to Brian Boyer for the tip.
