By Jolene Maré

Mu Lin, a digital journalism professional writes on her website, “Guidelines for print news writing and web writing have been well-covered; however, guidelines for journalistic Twitter writing have not been well established.” With that in mind here are a few guidelines to tweeting journalistic style.

Follow Associated Press style

The best way to know if you are keeping within a journalistic style, is if you use the correct punctuation, spelling and grammar that you would use in a normal article. Even if you only have 140 characters to work with, try using short and to-the-point sentences.

Tim Chilcote, a senior copywriter at Ignite Social Media writes, “Social media is not a private instant messaging service. That means no LOL, RU, BRB, NP, etc. Shorthand or insider slang is acceptable in a one-on-one online conversation with a friend. But in a public forum, it can be off-putting. And if your tweet gets picked up and shared by a news organization, industry leader, or celebrity, you'd be better served to clearly spell out your meaning.”

Avoid tweeting about personal opinions and comments

If a journalist feels strongly about having a personal social media presence, then he or she can open separate social media accounts. The private account should make no reference to the person’s role as a journalist. At the end it is up to you and your publication to decide where the boundaries are, and its best to set these in place to avoid any future misunderstandings.

“If you are a business user, refrain from getting into any personal talks on Twitter. Most followers would not be interested in such information anyway so there’s no point in overloading them with useless information,” writes Douglas Idugboe, founder and chief editor of Smedio.

Tweet key information

As a journalist, you have to get all your facts straight while remaining as specific as you can be. Do as much research as you can. If it is interesting enough to tweet about – make sure it is correct.

Lin advises, “Who, when, where, what, why, how. You need to have background information based on research/interview.”

“Some organisations remind journalists that they should not lower their investigative standards for material obtained by means of social media. While it may seem obvious that reporters should apply the same healthy scepticism to social media as they should to any information source, examples of failure to do so abound,” writes Camille Calman, an associate at Davis Wright Tremaine, legal advisors in New York. “In addition to false reports of celebrity deaths, major news organizations have been fooled by unfounded stories about political figures or even April Fool’s jokes.”

“Looking at the above guidelines, one may realise that, for the most part, it is what a newspaper reporter needs to do for a print news article,” says Lin. “[T]he time-tested ‘old’ journalism is still basis for good digital journalism.”

What are your thoughts? Do you have any other guidelines journalists looking to use Twitter? Tell us below.