The important thing is, not to wait until you make an error – test the process before something goes wrong.

Sooner or later you will write something that you wish hadn’t gone public. Before you ask: you cannot edit a sent tweet. Period. You do not have the 15 minute window to edit a message like you do on LinkedIn. Your only option is to leave it, apologise for it or kill it.

Scroll back through your old Twitter messages and practice deleting a tweet:

– from the website http://twitter.com
– from a third party app, like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.
– from your phone app.

What happens if you’ve just sent one out and spotted an error? Either:

– remove it immediately
If you do this, understand that someone else may have already seen, shared, copied & pasted, or took a screen-shot of it. The severity of the error will depend on their action. If you need to do this, act fast, then apologise for it and depending on the time frame involved, search for the message keywords and try and determine if someone has already blogged or shared it elsewhere. As a general rule, I rarely delete a tweet, unless it is commercially sensitive, or my fingers have slipped on the keyboard and I’ve changed ‘shot’ into ‘shit’ and changed the entire meaning of the message.

– ignore the error and leave it as is.
I do this a lot and I don’t care that my ‘error’ is out there. In fact I very often don’t re-read a tweet before I send it out. This is my personal choice and my personal Twitter account. My only justification for this process is that I believe my intelligence will be determined by more than an error in a tweet. I could go into a whole rant about this reason why I like this approach, but will save this for another time (unless someone asks for it, of course).

– send the tweet out again with the correction made
This is the preferred option. This is a good option. This approach gets more attention. As a general rule, Twitter streams are predicable: the avatars we see (and rarely change), the frequency of faces and updates, the types of content being shared (text). Therefore, anything which breaks that pattern grabs our eyeballs. Duplication is one of those: a Tweet sent twice with a minor difference and no apology for it, makes us look at it twice. If you do this to correct an error, no-one will complain. If you do this as part of an attention seeking Twitter strategy, beware! You’ll annoy people and have them hovering over the ‘unfollow’ button fast.

Enough brain dribble, back to work for me. Carry on