7 Easy Ways to Shorten your Tweet's Character Count | Blog

Tessa May Marr

February 10, 2015

Here are 7 easy ways to shorten your tweet's character count, so you can fit exactly what you want to say into your Tweets every time!

1. Use images with text.

There’s an excellent app called Word Swag and it lets you create eye-catching images with text. So while including an image in your tweet takes up 23 characters, include a heading or tagline that’s more than that and you’re getting better return! Plus images are proven to generate more engagement so even if you broke even on character count, it's a wise move.

2. Tag your photos.

Tagging photos with Twitter handles instead of mentioning handles within your tweet saves space! This way, they are notified of the tag and others can see what they've been tagged, but you don’t have to spend any characters on them (which is especially good if they’re lengthy)!

3. Cut out joiner words.

People read tweets quickly as they thumb through their News Feeds, making the fluffy joiner words less important. Check out this example:

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4. Shorten your words.

Change “with” to “w/" or Change “because” to “bc”. Almost everyone knows what they mean and it saves you those extra characters. This isn't an English essay, people. We’re tweeting. Keep it casual.

5. Lists are better without commas.

When making lists, hit return to start a new line instead of using commas. It appears to be a longer tweet but the return only uses one character while a comma and a space use two, cutting your in between character count in half. Also, tweets that appear longer and in a different format are attention-grabbing in users’ News Feeds’, so you are more likely to be noticed.

6. Use numbers.

Yes technically any single-digit number is supposed to be written out if you’re following the grammatical rules you learned in school, but that doesn't apply here. Tweets with numbers statistically get picked up more than the wordier ones, and they save you a few characters.