Twitter has quickly gained popularity and is now second only to Facebook in terms social networking success. Because of the character limit many bloggers tend to disregard twitter, but as it’s popularity continues to grow it’s usefulness as a networking and self-promotion tool is becoming hard to ignore.  These are a few tips to help you stay professional and polished in 140 characters.

Because of the 140 character limit composing a tweet is in many ways more difficult than composing a blog post. It’s important that you take your time and think about the wording of your tweet before posting it. Think hard about not only what it’s saying but who is reading it.

Something that seems obvious and not worth mentioning to the person composing the tweet, if left out or glanced over maybe confusing for some of your followers. It’s important that any information you’re trying to convey stays clear and easy to understand.

When faced with such a low character cap it’s tempting to disregard basic punctuation or incorrectly spell words in order to shorten them. If you’re a professional blogger, it is important to ask yourself: “is that really how I want to present myself and my blog?” If you came across a blog that completely disregarded punctuation and used words such as “w8,” would you be willing to do business with them?

That’s the type of image you’re presenting to potential clients and readers when that temptation is given into. It may require a little creativity but it is possible to get your message across without compromising grammar and spelling. One example is to have a book of synonyms on hand at all times to help with word choice.

Often the reason someone composes a tweet is to share something they came across on the web, or to notify their followers of an update to their blog. A URL can often be extremely long, but posting a link without at least a basic comment as to what the link is probably will not get you very many hits.

This is where URL shortening services such as tiny URL and bit.ly come into play. What these services do is take a long URL and offer you a much shorter URL that forwards to the same destination. If used properly, these services should allow plenty of space for the shortened URL and a small comment as to what it is.