Blue bird on speech bubble
Credit: zakokor for Pexel

We all know how painstaking it can be to execute the perfect twitter thread. As anyone who knows Mark Twain's expression, “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one", perfecting a narrative or series of takeaways over a multi-tweet thread can be almost as painstaking an edit process as composing poetry. If not quite as creative.

Once you have gone to all that effort, however, Twitter's algorithm helpfully only shows the first and last two tweets of a thread in followers' timelines. Thanks to Matthew Heytens, a writer and executive communications manager, who tweeted this tip to help get your carefully constructed twitter thread more widely seen.

Tweet could not be found or could not be loaded.

Heyten helpfully summarises this tip into three 'must-do' elements of your twitter thread which he likens to bookending your thread.

Those three steps are:

  1. Make your first tweet a ‘lead-in tweet’ ‘with a "scroll-stopping headline"
  2. Use the penultimate tweet to summarise your entire thread, a sort of conclusion
  3. Wrap up the whole thread with a final tweet that contains your call to action
Tags: Click tag to find related articles; click icon for feed

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).

Related articles