This may be old news to you all but to me it's something I am just beginning to try. Anyone of us who uses Twitter more than likely posts links from time to time. Theoretically, we want our followers to click those links to view the content that we are sharing. But how do we stay above the noise?

Most people probably follow a LOT of people and their feeds update quickly so scanning is of the essence. You have to prioritize your clicks according to what seems most intriguing to you. So why not go out of your way to make the lead-in to those tweets entertaining?

Within the last couple of weeks, I've been intentionally scheduling all my tweets in Hootsuite to make a point of using the ow.ly URL shortener. The (free) analytics in Hootsuite give me the number of clicks I receive for each link.

I've recently made a game out of seeing how many clicks I can get for one link. To do that, I know I have to make the headline to each link intriguing or at least give it some entertainment value. Not making those links misleading of course, like posting about Twitter helping me survive a bear attack, but simply giving the linked content a better introduction. Sure it takes a little more thought but I've found it's a fun way to make a creative exercise out of normal social networking actions. I schedule most of what I post in the morning and check the end of the day to see what links get what clicks.

Making a game out of improving my headline writing skills has had a positive carryover in the other creative work that I have to do. Simple little things like that or coming up with a beer cart theme like we do at Engauge are easy ways to work out those creative muscles in the brain in a pressure-free way.

What other ways do you exercise creativity muscles?