Should a Tweet button yield a suggested Tweet over 140 characters?

Question

I found the Stack Exchange Tweet Buttons can do exactly this and posted a Meta question about it.

The Tweet Button is for instant, easy sharing, but sometimes an article title can be too long to fit in a prepackaged, autogenerated Tweet. When this is the case, should the Tweet be automatically truncated or should the user be required to manually edit the tweet?

Currently the Stack Exchange Tweet Button will give the user a Tweet longer than 140 characters if necessary, and the Tweet can not be sent; instead the user will be given an error message and require them to edit the tweet. An example is below.

Assume the Tweet text is generated programatically; a human can't prescreen all suggested tweets before the user sees the Tweet Button.

Here's Twitter's Offical Documentation on the Tweet Button. Sitepoint also has a guide on How to add a Tweet Button Anywhere and notes the intended use of the Tweet button is to share a link with just a click; not just an edit and a click.

Is it acceptable to require a user to edit a Tweet generated by a Tweet button?

Answer 1

I would try to avoid automatic truncation for as long as possible, by gradually abbreviating the generic elements. For instance, in your example I'd first abbreviate Stack Exchange to SE, then, if the tweet is still too long, make it Sci-Fi SE. I don't think it needs to be abbreviated always, only when the tweets are too long.

When the tweet is still too long, I'd suggest a truncated version and let the user edit it.

Answer 2

Quick answer:

No, it's not acceptable to require a user to edit an auto-generated tweet just to fit the 140 character limit but users should still have the option to review & edit the auto-generated tweet.

Long answer:

Disregarding all best practices & guidelines, the common sense of great experience says, "If you are automating something for the user but letting them approve in the final step, make sure the auto-generated content is compliant with all requirements to minimize user involvement."

The general social media marketing guidelines suggest that all tweets should be ideally no more than 125 characters to allow for old-style RTs (where RT & username are included in the body reducing the available characters for the person who retweets). They also suggest that auto-generated tweets should make sense to readers (i.e. try to avoid truncating words).

So the overall best practice for auto-generated tweets is being concise/short, making sense, and requiring little user editing unless they want something custom. And those who want a custom message can easily modify it because that's the way Tweet This" button works.

The case of answer announcements on Stack:

The purpose of the tweet is to inform your "following" of a question you answered so that they would come visit the site, browse it, and maybe join the community. The key parts in the tweet are the question and the link to it. In addition, the tweet contains a "lead" with the name of the forum and subject & predicate to make a sentence.

Of these three parts, 2 are under total control of admins: the lead and the URL. And the question title isn't controllable. However, admins can also run a query against the database and find out the average character count on all questions ever submitted.

With all this data in their hands, admins need to write a lead that is as short as possible while making sense and put the URL through a shortener (stock like t.co/bit.ly or a custom one) so that the remaining characters of the tweet would fit an average question plus at least 1 standard deviation (Six Sigma might be too tough here). They can also save 7 characters by truncating the protocol declaration http:// from the URL as Twitter will understand & hyperlink it anyway.

Examples:

I responded to a UX Q: Should a Tweet button yield a suggested Tweet over 140 characters? stkx.ge/1234567

I responded to Sci-Fi Q: Is there any indication that latinum is useful in production? stkx.ge/1234567

I responded to coding Q: load external html into a div replaces content of original page with external html stkx.ge/1234567

I responded to English lang Q: Is this sentence correct - “They want to eat food they know is good for them.”? stkx.ge/1234567

Answer 3

I think it boils downs to: is the sharing intent routine or something special?

If you expect users to click share and get off with it with no more effort, then make it so by truncating or using the described techniques on other answers. This will probably give a less meaningful tweet but will make it frictionless.

If you expect users to personalize the tweet, give them the "power" to decide where to trim.

Another consideration is: it is more hassle to rebuild a trimmed tweet than to trim it manually. (Users that wanted to edit would be more penalized if it were automatically trimmed than users that want to send without editing and it is not automatically trimmed.)

Since, as always, it depends on the userbase, I would run some test to see on the >140 character situations how many users, given the "automatically trimmed" option, try to re-format the tweet to their like.

In a personal level, I say a rule of thumb would be give the user the option to edit, like SE does. Sending spamish tweets is not good for the user either.