How to Write Good Tweets
A good tweet answers all the important questions, gives credit, links to more information and ideally transports the essence of what you would like the reader to take away.
The important questions are:
- What is it about? (a title or short description)
- Who did it? (credits / twitter handle / project page)
- Where can I find more information? (Link to article or project)
- What does it look like? (visual impression)
Here is a short list of thoughts regarding these questions:
What is it about?
Describing your work in as few words as possible is often hard but it is worth the effort. Always be aware that the attention span of modern day twitter users is a question of seconds.
Journalists do this all the time when they create a title line and decide which part of their article will be the lead paragraph right below. It’s that short time span of a few seconds in which a reader decides to read the full article.
We developers do the same when we are asked to give our github project a name and short description.
A good description decides if readers engage with you message or scroll to the next tweet.
Who did it?
Giving credit is not just morally right. It also allows reads to discover who is behind the mentioned project or article. Maybe they remember the author from a talk that he gave on a conference or know him personally.
They can directly visit his profile or project page and may discover other interesting stuff that he or she did.
Where can I find more information?
Don’t forget the links to the actual content. Sometimes the project homepage, documentation and download pages are separate. In this case use all of them and give the links a title.
E.g.
Project
https://…
Documentation
http://…
There are cases in which your work has an appendix. This is often the case with threat reports. Try to provide the appendix in a form that can easily be used by your readers.
Don’t force them to extract IOCs or other content from PDF files. Best provide such information in a machine readable form. (I am big fan of CSV. Some people hate me for that. I don’t care.)
What does it look like?
We tend to think of ourselves as completely rational beings. Many even believe that visual information in form of graphs and screenshots — as it is often used in shiny white-papers — would distract us from the real facts.
I’d say that they are wrong and make a big mistake if they don’t use illustrative examples in the form of infographics, screenshots and demo videos to explain their work.
This is especially true if you are limited to 280 characters. 🐦
This is an example from a tweet that announced a new feature used in my hash lookup tool named “munin”, that allows to use it with a command line interface. You can see the switch to the mentioned “mode of operation”, a description, a paste field filled with text and hash values, the CTRL+D interrupt at its end and then the first processed line in red color.
You immediately understand how this mode works just by looking at the screenshot.
Other twitter users often use arrows, highlight or comments in their screenshot to point the user to the important sections. That’s even better but costs some time.
Formatting
You should also think about the formatting of your tweet.
- Don’t just write a big paragraph of text
- Make use of line breaks
- Don’t overload your tweet with too many hashtags
- Seperate links or clickable elements with line breaks (easier to click the right link for users with touch input)
- It’s 2019: you can use emoticons to attract attention ⚡️ and make it visually more interesting 😉
Here are some templates for different types of tweets:
Article Tweet Template
[Title]
by [author / company / twitter handle]
[Link to article]
[Attach: Images used in article]
Project Tweet Template
[Project Name]
[Short description (<8 words)]
by [author / company / twitter handle]
[Link to project page]
[Attach: Screenshots]
Project Update Tweet Template
[Project name] [version]
[Short description (<8 words)]
[- Important changes]
[Link to release page]
[Attach: Screenshots of new features]
