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This short is going to be short but sweet. It’s short because there’s not a whole lot to say about this tip. It’s just something that I see a lot of people not figuring out, and it seems to escape even the Twitter elite at times.

The problem
What are people doing wrong, you ask? They’re using all 140 characters to tweet. I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out. When you retweet, your RT includes “RT”, a space, “@”, the original tweeter’s Twitter name, another space, and their tweet. This means that if your Twitter user name is eight characters long, combined with the other retweet elements, a retweet would be a full 13 characters longer than the original tweet. If your original tweet was 132 characters, when someone tries to retweet it, the result is a 145 character tweet and they’ll have to either edit your tweet using their best judgment, leave out your name, or just decide not to mess with it at all and not even RT. See the problem?

The solution
First, you need to remember to keep your character count in check. Just remember that you don’t have 140 characters anymore. In the example above, your user name is eight characters and a retweet adds 13 characters. So to be successful, you’ll want to try to keep your tweets under 127 characters or if you’re watching the “remaining” characters count down, don’t let it get below 13. Use abbreviations, acronyms, and url shorteners like http://lnk.gd to keep it short and be retweetable.