Perspectives & Strategy

Our ability to communicate is one of the key aspects of our humanity. Sadly communicating effectively is something that few of us do consistently. It is vital to communicate effectively if you are delivering a message in 140 characters. This is the essence of much of the Social Media communities. The message we deliver causes people to listen to us, or conversely stop listening; so it must be right.

The reason for the 140 characters has everything to do with the history of computer communications. the 140 characters corresponds to the 160 characters for the SMS or text message, except a little chunk is used for data management. This 160 characters equates to two lines of 80 characters – the limit of plain text on an old computer terminal from the 60′s or 70′s.

Sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo and others all use 140 characters for updates. The keys to communicating effectively in 140 characters are:

☼ The Message

☼ Linking to a Web Page

☼ Making it meaningful.

The Message is the starting point. Social Media is a very public form of communication. So what message can you deliver in 140 characters? Surely that is too short to create something really meaningful. Yet millions of messages are delivered this way every day today.

What you have to do is create a reason for people to listen to the remainder of your story. It should be focused. The message needs to draw people to your story, rather like a newspaper headline. It should be effective. How and what you say are important. It should make people want to know more. Social Media in some respects is about ‘spreading the news’. It is personal in so far it is your message – but of course the whole world can find your message if they are mindful to.

Some other tips: Be involved in the conversation – give your opinion; spread the word about good things other people do; be interesting; don’t spam people.

Web Links are necessary because they drive people to the real story, whether it was written by you or someone else. Where exactly do you need to drive people? It is no use telling people about a new story on Christmas sausages then pointing them to the website containing the story (as well as a dozen other things) is next to useless – they MUST go directly to the important story – like directing the reader to the right page in a book – you have the bookmark – put a sticky marker on it!

The problem with web addresses is that they can be very long, in some instances they are more than 140 characters in length. This is where a URL shortening service comes in handy. One of the first of these was tinyurl.com yet there are others like is.gd and bit.ly produce even smaller length links. This allows you to publicise your article without using too many characters.

Making it meaningful is largely a matter of personality. I talked about how things are said and what you say being important, yet personality adds meaning. The message needs to be meaningful to your READERS, or followers more than to you. But that is the essence of communication isn’t it? We started talking to deliver a message yet as we develop as human beings that message can become more intricate and ethereal. So it is with the message we deliver to others within the confines of our 140 characters.

Remember though as Confucius once said it is not possible to please everyone all of the time and we should not try to do so. You can do it. Make your statement, and move on.

In conclusion it is quite possible to deliver an effective and meaningful message in the 140 character format used by many Social Media sites. To get the best out of the service we also need to give people somewhere else to go – the website (like this one) with useful information. I would love to hear how you think we can communicate effectively in 140 characters.

Further Reading:

Communicating effectively, 140 Characters at a Time by Greg Henderson

Mashing it up: Nicolas Carr on Twitter’s 140 character limit…