Twitter tips for our tweeter-in-chief @realdonaldtrump (and the rest of us)

By Brenna Williams

CNN

We’re not going to lie; it happens to all of us when we tweet – the errant punctuation, the embarrassing typo. But Donald Trump is our tweeter-in-chief. He types 140 characters; he sends journalists into a tizzy. The rest of us can only wish we had that kind of impact (or followers). So, here are a few Twitter tips to help PEOTUS polish up his almighty feed (and for him to RT!)

This week, Trump quoted a tweet praising his eldest daughter Ivanka as “a woman with real character and class.” Something any father would be proud to hear a stranger say about his daughter.

The only problem is the original tweet tagged @Ivanka, not @IvankaTrump. The owner of the @Ivanka handle is a digital consultant named Ivanka Majic. It’s perfectly fine to correct a handle when one shares kind words about their family.

Last week, Trump praised Linda Bean — granddaughter of L.L. Bean founder Leon Leonwood Bean, and asked everyone to buy L.L. Bean.

Straightforward and nice. Just one oddity — instead of tagging the company’s handle, @LLBean, he tagged @LBPerfectMaine, a tourism company. Pretty sure they appreciated the shoutout.

It was really nice of Trump to mention CNN’s book “Unprecedented” — now with a new photo on the cover of the special inauguration edition! — but the only people who saw it were those who follow both CNN and Trump. That’s because, tweets meant for everyone shouldn’t start by mentioning another handle. Starting a tweet with an ‘@’ will turn the tweet into a conversation only visible on the timelines of users who follow both the tweeter and the handle being mentioned — the tweet-ee?

Most people put a period in front of the handle to kick off the tweet, but any punctuation will do. Never underestimate the appeal of a well placed ~tilde~.

This is just an aesthetic and personal style choice. When Trump wants to comment on a tweet, he uses quote marks.

For example:

Very polite to thank someone, but quoting the tweet first would have made Graham’s original tweet stand out more. And giving visibility to someone who’s being nice is another way to thank them. It also frees up more characters to use in a response.

The other benefit is that those seeing the tweet know the original wasn’t edited or cut down. The option of quoting a tweet before adding a comment is available on both mobile apps and desktop. It actually takes more effort to copy, paste and comment a tweet.

When one is the future leader of the free world, or when one live tweets The Bachelor, many thoughts cannot be squished into 140 characters. For long tweets, Trump uses the good old ellipsis (1/3)…

to denote he’ll continue his thought in the next tweet, often breaking up the thought mid-sentence without so much as a (2/3)…

number system to denote where in the thought you are. (3/3)

Take his recent lashing of the new season of The Celebrity Apprentice:

This is clearly a topic that has left some scratching our heads.

Brands have learned it, celebrities have learned it, Tweeters learn it daily: speel spell check everything.

Let’s be honest: Who hasn’t spelled Phoenix incorrectly at least 25 times in their life?

It appears the people of Phoenix forgave Trump for this faux pas, but there are so many words with spellings in the danger zone that it’s always good to double check.