One rule for writing a good tweet

Daniel asked me to put together a post about how to write a good tweet. So naturally I thought about it with a copywriter’s head on. Is it about style? The art of précis? Readability?

I took a look at what other people thought. Unsurprisingly there are gigabytes of how-to lists for writing tweets out there. This one is good. So is this. And this one has a useful list of all the how-to lists.

I read ‘em all, and a few more too. And like anyone in the Twitterverse I’ve read a whole load of tweets.

Then I came to a simple conclusion.

There’s just one rule for writing a good tweet:

Be interesting.

That's it.

Just one rule.

Because if you're being interesting, you're almost certainly doing everything else right. Think about it. What's interesting? It's stuff that's new. Informative. Relevant to you. Useful. Maybe controversial. Mind-expanding. Commercially helpful. Entertaining. And easy to grasp.

What matters, then, is not how to write a good tweet, but how to be interesting. This, incidentally, is something that’s right at the heart of all business copywriting. So we’ll follow up this post with a few more about being interesting: writing things your target audience will want to read, being helpful, pitching controversy at the right level.

What do you think? Is there more to Twitter than just being interesting?