Status updates should not be novels

I have a confession to make; I am guilty of writing too much when trying to explain something via Skype, or through a chat messaging system. It has been often said “What are you writing a book?” and then I switched to making sure I pressed enter after every few sentence to prevent hearing that again.

But it got me thinking, since the original caps on characters began with text messaging we have really shorten how much we truly want to read in a messaging format. Twitter mimicked this behavior by completely tapping into our short attention spans.

I was born to talk and this is partly why I have such a passion for social media and blogging, perhaps even why Facebook is my social network of choice since it has expanded its characters to more than necessary.

However, on social networks you need to always find a way to sum up what you are trying to say in as little characters as you can. Regardless if you are a talker or not, this is something that I learned; that although social networks are designed for communicating, it is not meant for a constant one on one, it is for a variety of people to see what an array of people are doing. Therefore they scan.

People don’t have time to read a drawn out status update that looks like it could use some chapters, instead they would rather spend their time scanning through the various updates that are short and to the point so they can make an action (by liking, commenting or sharing) or by choosing to move on.

Every now and again you can write long status updates where provided but the likeliness of it receiving any actions lowers with the more characters you use.

Find another platform like blogging to share thoughts that exceed 140 characters and keep your statuses short no matter what social site you are using since status updates should not be a novel they should be more like an excerpt.