For those who ignore social media, you can ignore this.
For the rest of you, I have a word about laziness. Yes, I’m talking to you, person who has your Facebook feed set to automatically retweet things.
Here is the situation. Twitter allows for 140 characters. It is an art and science to craft messages that fit the space and make sense. Much can be communicated in a good tweet.
The bulk of Twitter users do this correctly and have fun in that ecosystem. But some people have things set to automatically repost from other sites, and it is a mess. The robot isn’t helping you.
There are two common errors: the cutoff message and the unexplained link.
The cutoff message is when something important is being
See how annoying it is when someone starts a sentence but
That’s how your tweets
The second error is the unexplained link. Why would anyone want to click on something with no explanation whatsover? It could be spam, or an advertisement, or any number of things.
Some people are sending important messages, such as:
fb.me/abcDEF123
That’s all we see. Crucial information, eh? So important that no context is given. It is a string of meaninglessness.
A good message on Twitter does provide context. It tells readers what to expect when they click, such as:
…
VT Sec. of State ?@VermontSOS 4m
4 minutes ago
You can now check out the official results of the #vtprimary election here: http://vtelectionresults.sec.state.vt.us/Index.html#/home … #vtpoli
…
That tweet tells you what to expect (election results) and provides a link. It even alerts others to this news (vtpoli) with a hashtag. Simple, but also effective.
So, what to do. If you have your social media feeds set to auto-publish on other platforms, please reconsider. Go look at what your important messages look like at those other sites. If it looks like a bunch of crud, take action, and start using each social media platform you choose without the assistance of robotic auto-publishing.
You’ll be doing yourself, and everyone who wants to know what you are talking about, a favor.
Follow iBrattleboro at https://twitter.com/ibrattleboro
