When 140 Characters is not Enough; You Need BigTweet

One of the nice things about Twitter is the fact that we’re forced to use no more than 140 characters to make our point. The more I tweet the better I get at being succinct — though I’ve never been particularly verbose anyway — but I’m sure for some of you it’s a real challenge, especially the chattier among you. Just remember that one of the signs of good writing is being able to say a lot with a few words.

Now to be fair, it is important to understand that we don’t get the entire 140 characters to ourselves. For one thing, our Twitter name counts against us, so when you tweet an @reply to someone, the longer their name the shorter your message will be. Anyone reading this who isn’t already using Twitter should keep that in mind when picking your name. If you register @JonathanAbernathyTheMarketingExpert, don’t expect a lot of coherent @replies.

Another thing that frequently takes up some of our precious 140 characters is the urls we post. Fortunately there are services like TinyURL that will shorten long urls but you’ll probably still lose 10 or more characters even with a TinyURL.

So, on those occasions when you’ve removed as many words as you can before your tweet no longer makes sense and you’ve used every abbreviation known to man but you’re still over the 140 character limit, don’t despair, BigTweet is here. BigTweet is a very handy toolbar plugin that you simply drag to your browsers toolbar. On those hopefully rare but sometimes unavoidable occasions when you just can’t say it in less than 140 characters, you click the toolbar button; type or paste your tweet into the text box; select the 240 character option; click “update”; and voila, your nicely formatted two part tweet is posted for you.

In addition to simplifying the task of creating two-part posts, BigTweet also has a built-in url shortener, allows you to post special characters, like smilies, and handiest of all, you can can post to Twitter from any page on the web without having to jump over to Twitter.com or switch to an app like TweetDeck. Simply click the button, post your tweet and go right back to reading the page you were on. BigTweet will also automatically insert any highlighted text from a page into the text area.

BitTweet may not be something you use to post long tweets often but it’s still handy for the usual 140 character tweets too since you can use it to tweet from any page or post highlighted text automatically.

Related posts:

1. Tweet without Typing with TwitterFone
2. Twitter to Add Retweet Option but No Editing?