Twittiquette and other social media courtesies

As the world evolves around us so do the rules of decorum that we must follow to be socially acceptable. Journalists, especially, must be privy to the "new rules" or they risk credibility loss. But with Tweets, Facebook posts, tags and texts how can we possibly keep up?

Thanks to Twitter, journalists can be on scene, get word of a story, and send out a 140-character blurb to the world (Well, those of us on Twitter) or they can send out updates of stories, people on trial for example. And with hashtags, and @-tags, it's very easy for your Tweets to get read. This being the case, care and precision is key.
Like all journalism, knowing the facts is a must. Do not tweet speculation. Tweeting a story is the same as publishing in a newspaper, readers are judging you. It would be terrible to lose credibility over a false tweet.
Even though tweets are short, grammar is necessary. Do not use chatspeak (yes this means spell out "you" and "are"), and punctuate for goodness sake. It's annoying to read an improperly punctuated tweet, especially if you're looking to get news out of it.
Another twit-tip, don't clutter the tweet with twitter jargon. Readers don't want to sort through a mess of hashtags (although they can be useful) or links. Keep it simple, guys.

These simple tips can be applied to almost any source of social medium, although of course, you don't have to worry about character count and hashtags in anything other than twitter, but you still need to keep your posts short and interesting. People have short attention spans and we have to accommodate that.


My made up words for this post: Twittiquette (Chatspeak and hashtags are made up words too, but not mine.)