The ideal Twitter update length: Short enough to RT (re-tweet) easily

Twitter, the popular microblogging and messaging services, lets you share your thoughts with the world — as long as you keep each message under 140 characters.

Sounds easy, right? Just keep it under 140.

Well, not quite.

The actual length you should be thinking about is different, and it varies based on your username.

Here’s how to figure it out.

The magic formula for Twitter message length

Keep your messages at this length: 140 – ((number of characters in your username) + 6).

In my case, with a username of mbusse, that’d be 140 – (6 + 6), or 128.

What is the importance of this formula?

Your Twitter messages should be short enough that other people can re-tweet them without having to edit them.

Here’s how that formula ties in to this principle.

What is re-tweeting?

For those new to Twitter: re-tweeting is the act of sharing another person’s tweet with your followers — it can be a way of saying “I agree with this” or simply “this is interesting, check it out.” Twitter has a “retweet” button built in that does this for you.

But many people use the convention that was popular before the retweet button came along, and it looks like this:

Here, @digitalendemic is re-tweeting something I said. Note the beginning: “RT” for retweet, followed by my Twitter username (@mbusse) and then my message. He also added his own message at the end, after the two slashes.

Why does this matter?

What is important here is that I kept my message short enough that he could add in the “RT @mbusse” at the beginning without having to shorten my message at all.

Many people won’t bother to take the effort to edit your message before re-tweeting it. They simply won’t re-tweet your message at all, and this limits the spread of what you’re saying. Worse, they might edit it for length and end up butchering your message and/or misrepresenting you entirely.

Remember, the formula was 140 – ((number of characters in your username) + 6). The six characters are for the R, T, space and @ symbol before the username of the person you’re re-tweeting, and then a colon and another space after your username. Not everyone uses the colon (see the image above — no colon) but some people do, so it’s important to give them the space if they want it.

If you keep this formula for ideal Twitter length in mind, your messages and thoughts can be more easily shared with the world. And isn’t that the point of Twitter?