3 comments | 
Reid Carr is a social media expert.
Internet users have less time than ever to get through the mounds of content they face each day.
If you want people to embrace your ideas, they need to see:
– Headlines to help them categorize information
– Quickly highlight key points/takeaways
– Understand why they should care
Most of us need to practice how to do this, but thankfully, we have Twitter to keep us talking in 140 characters and distill thoughts into succinct statements. So, what you should do is:
– Write in bullet-format
– Keep things short
– Distill thoughts into succinct statements
While it may not be the delicate prose that some writers may prefer to craft, the point of social media in business is to reach people and influence them with your ideas.
Why it is important for you to face the growing trend is that:
– Bullets call out important items and focus the user’s eyes
– Short texts are easily “tweeted” to gain greater exposure for your ideas
– Bursts get ideas across to readers and make them memorable
While it isn’t sexy, it’s true: bullets and brevity will help most users navigate from your blog posts and social media experiments with memorable, usable and distributable value.
While you don’t always have to write that way, and you might not enjoy 140 character proses, you should try re-reading what you write and “bulletize” what you’d like others to remember as call-outs.
You can likely tighten and simplify what you’ve written to keep readers on-task.
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive, which specializes in Internet presence management. Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Tags: SDNN
Comment by: Julie Wright Posted: June 11, 2009, 4:01 pm
- Good post.
- I agree.
Comment by: William Bakhos Posted: June 11, 2009, 6:41 pm
Its very true, with networks like Twitter and people talking in acronyms never has there been a more important time to start getting to the point.
If you babble on people just lose interest these days!
Comment by: 6 down and dirty e-marketing tips (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest - June 12, 2009) Posted: June 12, 2009, 6:58 am
[...] to Reid Carr, the same writing style necessary to enlighten the world in 140 characters can help all your online writing. In my experience, I’ve found that customers will read longer pieces if you give them [...]