“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Six famous words by 20th century writer Ernest Hemingway. 33 characters – including spaces – that set up a poignant scene, that present their reader with an entire situation, characters and emotional sequence.
If you hark back to the now infamous phrase of another great 20th century figure, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, you’ll be familiar with the catch cry “less is more”. And it certainly needs to be so when you only have 280 characters in your pencil case.
The story of things (SoT)
Much like our modern consumerist society – on a seemingly continual mission to convince us ‘more is more, and more is never enough’ – our online stories compete continuously in new and endless streams of digital formats from Twitter and Facebook to blogs and fan fiction.
Abbreviations and colloquial references aside – think YOLO – it is possible to make a serious impact in 280 characters. In fact, I wish Twitter still ran on 140 characters.
A picture tells 1,000 words
If you’re going social, then images and/or video are the attention grabbers of the moment. But they’ll never replace words, opinions and the thoughts of those you might follow or who you wish would follow low you.