1. Use only one space between sentences. Most people are accustomed to two spaces after a sentence, but many publications use one space as the standard for web copy. Apply the same philosophy to your tweets. After typing your tweet, go back and delete a space between each sentence. If you typed four sentences, you saved three characters. If you typed five, four extra characters are at your disposal. It seems small, but four extra characters are useful if you need to add an extra word to your tweet.

2. Use sentence fragments. Very useful for maximizing your Twitter potential. Try now. See how it makes your sentences snappy and to the point? You don´t need to type "It is very useful for maximizing your Twitter potential" to get your message across. Twitter is a microblogging application and many Twitters, including celebrity and news twitters, shorten their tweets regularly to fit in more information. Shortening tweets by using fragments is perfectly acceptable. It won't compromise your credibility either.

3. Use abbreviations wisely. Substituting "ur" for "your" is not an acceptable way to use abbreviations. Substituting "MN" for "Minnesota" is. Use substitutions for long words or names to shorten your tweets, but use it wisely — using it too much is too distracting.

4. Avoid dashes. Dashes are great in articles and blog posts where you need to elaborate, but avoid using it on Twitter. Using one dash takes up three characters, and using two takes up six. Waste the tweet on information, not dashes. Simple, actionable words have the best success on Twitter, so eliminate any wordiness or extra punctuation.