As you surf the flow of Tweets running through the ever-heating-up medium of Twitter, you can frequently see an unusual little character icon or two used to decorate people’s postings. I’ve taken note of these over time, and I suspect that using these little graphic icons can sometimes increase the ability or a particular Tweet to stand out from the crowd. If you use Twitter to promote links to your blog articles and webpages, you might consider adding these special icons to your repertoire. I think these special characters can be Lucky Charms for your Twitter posts, if used carefully.

I recently experimented with adding some special characters to one of my Tweets, and it resulted in quite a number of Re-Tweets as well as clickthroughs. Although it involved an already highly-popular topic (Star Wars), I think the Tweet grabbed more people’s notice because the stars I added to it allowed it to stand out from the crowd more as people scanned the stream of Tweets running through their Twitter accounts:

Special Characters are not hard to add to Tweets, if you’re posting from online. They can be trickier if you’re attempting to Tweet via your wireless devices, since those do not all support extended character sets.

Here’s the classic “Lucky Charms” known to morning cereal afficianados — hearts, moons, stars, and clovers: ♥ ☾ ★ ♣

One of the most frequently used symbols in Tweets is a music notes symbol, when individuals Tweet the current song they’re listening to:

For those using Blip.fm, it’s very easy to Tweet out little messages indicating what you’re listening to, if you tie the services together, and Blip appears to automatically tack on the music notes symbol.

Special characters are handled in HTML and other markup languages via “entity reference” codes or “character references”, of course, and are nothing new. You may be able to simply copy and paste a special character that you want to use, but I’ve also found that you may need to actually paste in the special character code in order to get the symbol to appear.

Some special characters are really too intricate to adequately convey, unfortunately.

I’ve made a helpful list of special character entity codes which you can easily copy-and-paste into your Tweets. These are not all special characters, since I left out the more boring special punctuation characters, foreign language letters and symbols which I think are unlikely to communicate in the tiny letter size employed by Twitter:

It appears that the best way to send the special characters may be by simply copying the icon you wish to use and then pasting it into a Tweet. I experimented with copying the character code and with copying the displayed character itself, and both seem to work, though.

Just a note or two of caution: I believe special graphic characters such as these ought to be used to spice up posts occasionally, and should be avoided as a “main ingredient”. Use them sparingly, like exclamation points. If over-used, your audience will get graphic icon fatigue and their familiarity will lessen their ability to grab attention.

Again, these special characters won’t work on all devices! I can see the characters online through my PC browser, but not through my PDA. Via SMS, the character doesn’t go through at all, while surrounding text displays as normal. Via web browser on my PDA, there is just an unknown generic “block” character that appears in place of the special character. So, choose carefully if you wish to use these!

So, I’d also like to hear what you think about this. Have you used such characters to spice up your Tweets? If so, how effective do you think they are? Do they increase CTR when links are included?

Let us know what you think in the comments below.