This is the second post in my ad-hoc Tweetin’ Right series. 😉

I gave Micah a hard time recently for posting only a URL as a tweet (update) in Twitter. He, quite reasonably, asked me why this was a problem. There are a few reasons.

1. No context. Just having a URL come to me doesn’t make me want to click on it. I want to an idea of what it’s about before I click on it. Part of this is actually due to a Twitter feature that automatically creates a TinyURL and uses that in your tweet from URLs that are too long. Micah pointed out that the URL he posted was very clear (example.com/meaningful-keywords-here), but that was getting lost when it was TinyURLed.
2. Why is it interesting? I’m guilty of not doing this myself at times in my weekly Around the web posts, but if someone is telling me about something I am generally just as interested in what someone thinks about it as I am in the thing itself. A brief commentary on the item or snarky remark will get me to click the link pretty quick.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Good example

Wow, I wish I could hit like this in the sand: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ-__CC0Sv8

Bad example

http://youtube.com/watch?v=W9_lTC0p93I

And there you have it.