Micro-communication is a marketable skill. Twitter users quickly learn how to shorten their statements to fit the 140 character limit per message. Here's how to do it.

As a former advertising copywriter, one of my tricks was to blurt out an approximation of what I wanted to say about a product. I let it be as awkward, silly, or sloppy as it wanted to be, flowing out of me rapidly, just to get something down on paper.

Then, with the unrefined text to work with, I'd make edits until it finally formed itself into a polished, truthful, persuasive statement.

 Twitter is similar. Most of us are not used to being few worded. We tend to blabber on and on, saying much but conveying little. The 140 character limit for a Twitter message forces us to re-think our writing style.

Brevity of communication is a marketable skill. Twitter enables us to perfect the skill of micro-content writing. But shortening your message to 140 characters, or a series of 140 character tweets, is just part of the job.

We also have to keep in mind RTs: ReTweets of our message by those who like something we communicated.

They may quote us, which requires them to add  "RT @username" to the quoted tweet. This restricts our character limit even further. I did a post on my Pluperfecter blog addressing this topic: "Maximum Twitter Message Length for Retweeting".

So we type in something like this:

Billy Mays is an icon in the con artist world of Social Media Experts with high-priced conferences. http://tinyurl.com/nrhmx4

Now that leaves us with 40 characters to spare. So far, so good.

But now if someone wants to ReTweet that, the RT would be:

RT: @vaspersthegrate Billy Mays is an icon in the con artist world of Social Media Experts with high-priced conferences. http://tinyurl.com/nrhmx4

...which is 6 characters too long for the Twitter 140 character limit.

How do we edit this tweet for RT purposes?

Let's change it to this:

Billy Mays = icon in con artist world of Social Media Experts w/ high-priced conferences. http://tinyurl.com/nrhmx4

 So the ReTweet message would be:

RT: @vaspersthegrate Billy Mays = icon in con artist world of Social Media Experts w/ high-priced conferences. http://tinyurl.com/nrhmx4

...leaving us 4 characters to spare.

In other words, the RT is only 136 characters. We changed "is" to "=" and deleted "an" and "the" and changed "with" to "w/".

You can use U for "you" and 2 for "to" and so forth in the style of text messaging.

When you compose a Twitter tweet, try to make it as short as possible. Some people like to add "LOL" or "Amen" or "W00t!" to their RT of your message, so that makes it even longer.

Keep these tips in mind for more effective micro-communicating.