People come in all shapes and sizes so it goes without saying that not all space ads will be created equal. That being said, it’s always nice when a space advertiser takes the time to determine a good number of characters for their ad before they run off to the post office. If you’re curious, here are a few tips to help you figure out how many characters you should use when creating your next ad:
The Anatomy Of A Space Ad
A space ad is basically anywhere a business or brand interacts with consumers or customers via social media. So, if you run a bakery business, you’d want to establish Twitter accounts for yourself and your employees, and engage with customers on a daily basis. That is the basics of what constitutes a space ad.
To determine the character count for your space ad, you need to take a few things into consideration. First off, the language you’ll be using in your tweets and other social media posts will affect the number of characters you need to fit everything in. More on that later. Second, the size of your characters and the fonts you’ll be using will also affect how many characters you have. Third, the design quality of your ads is also key in contributing to how much content you can fit in. Finally, the reach of your target audience is important as well. Will your ads be limited to just your social media followers or will you want to expose your ads to as many people as possible?
As you can see, there are a number of variables to consider when creating your next space ad. To make it easy for you, we at Square Matrix have you covered. Let’s take a look at how we can help you figure out how many characters you need to make your space ad sing.
The 3 R’s Of Effective Character Count
Now, as you’re probably aware, you have a finite amount of characters on a tweet. When you reach your 140 character limit, your tweets will wrap and you’ll have to continue the thread on another tweet. There’s nothing worse than having a space ad that looks perfect until you hit that dreaded 140 character tweet limit and then it all goes downhill from there. To prevent your tweets from getting cut off in this way, you need to make sure that you’re always fitting your content within the bounds of a tweet.
When you reach this point, you need to consider three things. First, do I want to stay within the bounds of a tweet? Second, does it make sense to fit all of this information into one tweet? Finally, is my tweet content interesting and engaging enough to hold the attention of my followers?
If you can answer yes to all three of these questions, then you should aim for around six or seven characters per tweet. Going for a longer tweet will generally decrease the value of your content. It just isn’t worth the extra characters when your followers can only read so much at a time.
How Many Characters Should You Use In Your Tweets?
When picking out fonts for your blog or website, you need to consider how many characters you have available per design. If you have a large choice of fonts, it’s best to select a condensed font like Helvetica Neue or Arial just to save on the number of characters used. For best results, stick with a clean sans serif such as Helvetica Neue or Arial.
To determine the exact number of characters you have per design, visit this site:
- Key your chosen font
- Include non-alphanumeric characters such as hyphens and apostrophes
- Remove all trailing spaces
- Ignore all spaces within words – this will make a massive difference
This will tell you how many characters you have available per design. It’s a good idea to round up to the nearest whole number. So, if you have five characters per design, you’ll want to use six characters for your space ad. If you have fewer than five characters per design, it’s best to use all five.
How Many Characters Should You Use For Boldface?
Now, this is something that can be a bit trickier to figure out. If you have a lot of text in your ad that’s in boldface or ALL CAPS, you’ll want to use more characters than usual to keep it legible. To find out how many characters you have available, we suggest using the
- Body
- Headers
- Paragraphs
- Images
- Links
- Shading
for a sans serif font like Helvetica Neue or Arial and the
- All Caps
- Boldface
- Underline
for a serif font like Times New Roman or Georgia. You’ll also want to consider using ALL CAPS for big blocks of text or tables.
Is Shorten N’ Squeeze All The Right Moves?
Shortening a URL is always a great way to increase the value of your content while at the same time saving on the number of characters you need to use. To do this, you need to use bit.ly, which is a free service. When picking a URL shortener, make sure to choose one that also provides analytics so you can see how many people are clicking on your shortened links. Using these three tips, you’ll be able to figure out how many characters you need for your space ad.