I have found that a great way to pack posts full of good content is to use images creatively and write lists onto pictures using photoshop. This essentially gives me an unlimited word count and allows our team to share large groups of factoids in a single tweet.
You see this technique used across all sorts of different subjects on twitter, with varying degrees of quality and success. They can range from cropped screen-shots of websites to professionally crafted graphic designs.
The 'record-breaking' season that led to David Moyes losing his job... http://t.co/VNnN6jxPK3 pic.twitter.com/PqLtM9ctnD
— The Sun (@TheSunNewspaper) April 22, 2014
Of course, the opportunity to have a much larger word count than Twitter would usually allow shouldn't be abused. Part of the reason for its success is that the 140 character format encourages users to be concise and clever about what they post. So with that in mind, I'm always keen to make the text in the pictures just as snappy as it would be in a tweet.
In many ways, twitter encourages everyone to write like a journalist and cut out all the unnecessary words. These rules still apply.
An obvious area where stats and facts can be really effective is football reporting. Football fans famously love a good stat, and huge numbers of them (including myself) are active on Twitter.
The example above is one I created after David Moyes was sacked as Man United manager. It was a huge story, so very obviously a good story to follow up on.
I made sure the background was Man United red by taking a screenshot of their website and pasting into photoshop, then using the eyedropper tool to get the correct shade. I then cut out a picture of Moyes to paste in and added a drop shadow onto the cutout image.
After that, it was just a case of assembling the facts from various online sources, checking them, and writing them in around the image. I also made sure to link back to Sun goals digital service, as we are constantly looking to cross-promote social media and paid-for Sun content.
As you can see, the post was retweeted hundreds of times. It also went on to become our most successful ever post on Google+.
#SUCCESS
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