Over the weekend I was reviewing a resource on digital media (“The 10 Essentials of Twitter Etiquette” from We Are Social Media). This got me thinking: do Twitter users learn the basics of this platform and then stop expanding their tweeting repertoire?
I am by no means a Twitter expert, but before I started my post-grad certificate program in Integrated Marketing Communications, I was very active on my personal Twitter account for a number of years, and these are my two favourite and underused abbreviations/terms:
MT or Modified Tweet
If there’s only one thing to remember about effective Twitter use, it’s to always add value. How better to do that than to retweet interesting content with your own insights tacked on?
That’s where MTs come in! Don’t just click the retweet button. Instead, compose a new tweet starting with your comments and ending with a shortened version of the other tweet, then preface the @ account with MT.
This means you could go from this:
To this:
HT or h/t or “via”
Transform your Twitter account from good to great by properly attributing the source of your content to its author. Remember that people love to get credit for their ideas – and who doesn’t like a mention?
You can accomplish this by symbolically tipping your hat to the original tweeter, hence the abbreviation HT or h/t, which is short for “hat tip”. If this phrase doesn’t carry much meaning for you (it’s not 1890 anymore, after all), you can instead use via in its place.
This means you could comment on this:
By saying this:
Do you have any go-to Twitter terms that help get your message across? Share them in the comments below. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter. When this semester’s workload eases up I will definitely be sharing more content there!
Andy Chan 