Know your number to get Re-tweets...

Posting to twitter is a great way to get your message out. It lets people who are following you or, more likely, following a key phrase or word, know that you have something to say of value. However, more important than your single is the ability for users to re-tweet (RT) your message. This makes it possible for your tweet to actually go viral and gain a significant amount of viewers. Thus getting your message out to a wider audience.

If your tweet uses all 140 allowed characters (thats all you can post folks) then when some one attempts to retweet, they will have to edit or truncate your post in order to fit the extra re-tweet tag. Some people may not retweet because of this, or your message may get lost because it has been deleted (for instance, the last characters of an important link).

This means that it is best practice is to leave extra space at the end of your tweet so that people can easily retweet your message without any hesitation. But how many spaces should you leave? Twittercism has a great formula to calculate your twitter number.

Your Number = length of username + 8 characters

That makes my number 16.

Which means I shouldn't be posting tweets longer than 124 characters (140-16=124). Sure is a good thing that my favorite twitter manager (cotweet) counts my characters for me. Now I have to make sure that all of my tweets are the right length every time.