The Good, Bad and Ugly

The Good (The Creative)

The showing personality/having fun

NYTimes review: “The tweets we wrote that produce the “ZOMG!” moments aren’t always our greatest hits in terms of clickthrough or engagement. But finding the right opportunities to veer away from our institutional voice helps leaven our daily coverage of news and creates different kinds of memorable moments that readers enjoy.

The Interesting (with visual)

Compare these two

But the NYTimes review of its Twitter found:

“Not every good or successful tweet requires an embedded photo. Sometimes the 22 characters taken up by a photo might be better used to write a more interesting tweet. And sometimes the additional engagement generated by adding a photo — retweets, likes, and replies — yields little additional clickthrough to NYTimes.com.”

The intriguing question/the startling stat (but don’t overuse)

You must try to be creative; it’s not really a lead

The quote

The leaving enough room for RT comments

Don’t use all 140 characters (117 if a link)

Kudos for a RT

First on the scene with a good hashtag

And responding to mentions

Remember, sharing information is the No. 1 tweet that gets retweeted

Saving characters by using a URL shortener … if not

The Bad (The Repeat Offender)

If your tweet is this:

Your lead shouldn’t be this

Even the Washington Post does it

But the NYTimes recently challenged this notion

On a daily basis we publish many articles that need an alternative approach to attract readers that might come to us from social media. But there are also a significant number of instances where we shouldn’t try too hard to write a great tweet when other skilled journalists in our newsroom have already written one in the form of a headline.

The so overused !

The hashtag regurgitator

Actually professionals are using fewer hashtags

“Now, people have gotten a lot closer to using them for their original purpose — classification used to group overarching topics with lasting impact, like #BlackLivesMatter. It’s really about cataloguing conversation.”

No more than three hashtags per tweet. And they need to mean something, be searchable. (My pet peeve: #yummy)

Make sure your hashtag is very clear to all

So if you saw #WTFSEPT ….

Some funny hashtag etiquette

Check to make sure if a hashtag is already in use/what it means, etc.

Hashtags.org and Twubs, for example

There is no set where to place them; in fact, a lot of debate still about them in general

But it can be just as bad NOT to use a hashtag

The Ugly(Here’s my latest & Please share)

Here’s my latest blog post

The lump tweeter

It doesn’t look professional

You should use proper grammar, spelling and capitalization when possible: study.

From our friends at Buzzfeed

You always tweet the same things

*You can tweet your blog, but don’t just tweet your blog.

Instead:

• Retweet others• Share articles• Stand alone comments• Preview events• Pass along funny tweets • Remember all those uses of social media from

Day 2!