People who don’t get Twitter

April 16th, 2008 | Author: peter

I have a FREE course on maximising Twitter which goes in to this further, but there is too much band wagon hype kicking up, which the Twitter ecosphere needs to address right now. So here goes…

Twitter is not an Internet marketing vehicle. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it in your marketing, but it means you don’t be a lemon and try and spam up the community.
Sorry but, Twitter is NOT a “MASS” broadcast tool. If you think it is, you just don’t understand the Twitter ecology. Twitter is a relationship channel.
It is not passive like a blog. It is not a crap-farm like blog comments or (troll) forums. It is not an Instant chat messenger (which is more 1:1 real-time). It is about YOU and YOUR CIRCLE.
The people you follow (follow specifically rather than people who may follow you) are your circle. Only your circle is relevant. It is not really pheasable to have a circle bigger than 200 people (they’d have to be pretty quiet people at that) and 50 is more like it.
BUT that doesn’t mean you can’t interact via Twitter with a bigger circle, it just means you don’t use “Twitter” itself to do it. There are a variety of third party tools for managing multi threaded mass tweets.
People who are too “NOISY” (tweet too often) get ignored (unfollowed).
Communication is never about “you” but what about “you” is interesting to “them”. Ideally tweets should be relevant, interesting and productive. I am a boring old fart in this respect, so IF your circle are happy for you to talk about paint drying, then absolutely carry right on! Maybe paint wetness is important to your circle
But “human” stuff (feelings) are interesting so maybe “how are you feeling“, is more appropriate than Twitter’s own “what are you doing“.
But Twitter isn’t an agony aunt. Also it is PUBLIC, so what you say can be heard and used against you in a court of law, or at a job interview.
Twitter Dominator, my own program, is a “responsible” program. The title is “scary” (damn marketing department LOL) but it’s actually about being responsible. For most power users it’s probably 60% metrics (monitoring what is going on), 15% efficiency and 25% discovering and reacting to new opportunities.
Twitter is NOT a PR news bulletin or RSS “ping” service. There are even TOS conditions about posting too many links to your website/shop. So people (i.e. named after a famous horse) who think it’s a personal lifeline to their club, maybe you are right for your circle of Internet Groupies (as I often call them). But that isn’t the way it works for (most) self appointed celebrities. Oh and BTW if you think people can’t spot tweet PLANTS you’re grossly underestimating peoples intelligence.
You may think everything you have to say is interesting. Just realise that it probably isn’t. You only need 1 tweet in a day (6 hours then), to have an almost identical pulling power.
The TOS says you can only (really) have 1 account. So decide “who” you want to be on Twitter and act accordingly. The web is pretty transparent and Twitter is totally public.
If you read my other blog posts, you’ll notice the traffic (and quality of traffic) that Twitter can generate.

For more, or to see how to put Twitter in to “context”, you really need to just sign-up for the free course. It’s a course, and not a report or an article for some very good reasons. Which you’d find out f you took it

It’s worth learning Twitter, because it also 80% applies to any other social network or Internet presence these days.

I just did 2 quick twitter clouds. On my own Twitter, my favourate word is apparently;

FACEBOOK (probably due to my Newsletters turnkey shop application for Facebook – gratuitous plug – sorry) followed by SAY BLOG THINK SOCIAL MEDIA GOOGLE PEOPLE in no particular order And apparently I mainly talk to Caroline Middlebrook (though she usually ignores me LOL), which I hadn’t realised. (Not that she ignores me, I knew that LOL, but that I talk to her so often.)

And the top word for Dr Mani is “thanks” which is just so cute (& I mean that in a fluffy bunny way as a reflection of his charitable work and non IM kharma).
Also note how he talks a LOT specifically “TO” particular people in his circle frequently. A relationship! Not a mass PING service.

FYI I just donated 5 (measly) bucks to twitter cloud. As they said. If every one did even 1 buck, they could do a lot more stuff. But that doesn’t mean I’ve let 5 of you off – LOL. It just means I expect to cause them some traffic