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MEDIA BYTES

By Rev. Marty Levesque

Social media and digital managers, public relations, crisis management, comms specialist, speech writers, fundraising and more are all based on sound communications principles. Simply put, communication is an art. One that needs to be studied and kept up to date with new and emerging technologies.

There is an art to crafting the perfect message, the right tweet, or the best post to drive traffic and engagement. Yet, even with enough time to craft the perfect message, or get a message out quickly, typos are part of the game.

Facebook allows for posts to be edited, which is helpful when you notice the typo minutes after hitting send. But for years, Twitter has not had the same feature until recently. The introduction by Twitter for users to edit their tweets is a game changer.

Up to this point, if you noticed a mistake the only option was to delete the tweet and repost it with the correction. While this doesn't sound like a hassle, it did mean that “likes” and “retweets” would be lost.

Twitter does preserve a history of the tweet, with the typo that users can access if they go digging. But the good news is that you can now fix the tweet while maintaining all the likes and retweets it has garnered. 

Matthew 12:36 says, I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak.

So let us no longer be careless when tweeting and correct those annoying typos.

Rev. Marty Levesque is the diocesan social media officer and rector of All Saints’ in Waterloo. martylevesque@diohuron.org