Whenever you want to do something right, it takes a little extra effort. Twitter is no different than anything else. Sure, you can tweet a photo of your breakfast with no explanation. That’s not the worst thing in the world, right? But you can make your tweet even better with just a few tweaks!

How To Improve A Tweet: Five Best Ways

You can certainly improve your own tweets, but if you want extra EXTRA credit, you could take your friend’s tweet and apply these same tricks!

If There’s a Link, Read the Article, and Provide a Quote

Lots of people use the formula of an article title plus the link. But now you have 280 characters on Twitter, so you can add a bit more without using up all your real estate. Remember to leave some space (say, 20 characters) if someone wants to retweet it, though. Your Twitter handle also takes up some of that real estate! Go into the article and find the main topic and put that into a quote.

So now you have Quote + Article TItle + Link.

Shorten the URL

Go to Bit.ly or whatever your favorite link shortener is, and shorten that link. I usually use Bitly, and it seems to be the preferred link shortener on Twitter. It’s easier to have a shortened link, and looks a little better, too.

Make an Even Better Shortened URL

Using Bitly, you can create a shortened URL that includes a descriptive name and/or a date. For instance, last week I wrote about crowdsourcing for content creation.  I could use the whole big, long link, or I could shorten it. Here’s a better, shortened link: http://bit.ly/CrowdsourceContentOct252018. Bitly explains that customized links get 34% more clicks, too. That seems worth the extra time.

Add a Hashtag…or Two

A hashtag or two helps people find your post. And if your friend’s post doesn’t have any hashtags, you could add one or two. Save the crazy hashtagging frenzy for Instagram, though. People on Twitter usually only use one or two. Read more about catapulting your tweet farther using hashtags.

Add an Image

Sometimes people tweet without an image. Of course, these days everyone likes images. If there’s no image, you could go to Pixabay and get a free one. And for extra credit (and to be courteous), you could credit the person who created that image, too.

So There You Go!

Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments! And thank you.