7 Ways Twitter Sharpens Your Writing

Twitter launched in 2006, at the dawn of the golden age of blogging. Nowadays, it’s known as a social network, but back then Twitter was a microblogging service. Twitter made sense to bloggers because, in simple terms, it was a blogging platform where blog posts had to be squeezed into 140 characters.
Twitter is a blogging platform and a place to sharpen your writing skills.
As a writer, you can use Twitter for all of the following.

1. Practice your writing.
Twitter is a writer’s sandbox. You can be creative, try out new things, see what works and what doesn’t. Because each update is so tiny and transient, your mistakes are quickly forgotten. But when you do something that resonates with your readers, it can reach thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of minutes.

2. Network with other writers
Twitter is known as a social network because it’s fantastic for networking. You can use it to talk directly with all kinds of writers from established old school writers (Neil Gaiman, Paulo Coelho, Alain de Botton) to successful self-published writers (Sean Platt, Joanna Penn, Ali Luke) to superstar bloggers (Jeff Goins, Danny Iny, Mary Jaksch).
Perhaps most important of all are the thousands of all-around friendly writers and editors who are still on the journey and are happy to chat, ask for feedback on their writing, and give feedback on yours. Some of my favorites are John Wiswell, Amanda Socci and Jackie Pearce.
As you network with other writers, you’ll discover writing tips, new writing challenges, and writing communities where you’ll feel right at home.

3. Keep your writing concise
Twitter gives you only 140 characters to play with, so it squeezes the excess pith from your words, leaving only the nourishing juice. You’re forced to write concisely, to discard the ore and share only the gold.

4. Track your results
To succeed as a professional writer, you must take a keen interest in numbers. Twitter allows you to track the success of your writing in hard numbers. You can see whether your follower count is growing, whether your tweets are being shared, and (using simple web apps such as Buffer) whether people are clicking the links you share.
If your follower count is flat-lining and your links aren’t being clicked, that’s useful feedback, and you can start to do things differently.

5. Find out what your readers want
One way of attracting more readers is knowing what your readers want. The simplest way to do this is to ask them, and Twitter provides the perfect platform to fire out questions to your readers.
Also, take note which tweets are most popular with your followers – either through retweets, replies, or clicking the link you shared. When readers share or reply to your tweets, they’re saying “More like this, please”.

6. Learn what entices
Twitter, with its built-in systems for tracking results, is ideal for learning what gets attention and what gets ignored. In particular, you can use Twitter to practice writing headlines that get the most clicks. The better you are at writing neck snapping headlines, the more readers you’ll attract to your blog posts, ebooks, and articles.

7. Discover creative inspiration and ideas
Twitter is a playground of ideas. Everywhere you look, you’ll find ideas for stories to tell, research to pursue, and people you could interview for your next article.
Whenever you feel stuck for writing ideas, turn to Twitter. In just a few minutes you’ll find an idea or story angle that excites you and you want to pursue.

Credit: Write to Done