Still Don’t Get Twitter? Maybe This Will Help
Posted by: admin in Social Media, blogging, socialnetworks, twitter
It’s okay to admit it. You’re among friends. You’ve been on Twitter for a couple of months now and you still can’t figure out what the heck all the fuss is about. It took me a while to “get” Twitter, too, but now I find it an indispensable part of my toolkit for gathering information and promoting my work. Here are some things to think about.
The 140-character limit is liberating. Writing blog entries is a time-consuming task. I’m not the type who fires off one-sentence posts, so I like to put some thought into what I say on a blog. In contrast, Twitter’s 140-character limit lends itself well to quick thoughts that I believe are worth sharing with others but that don’t justify a full-blown blog entry. Very little of what I tweet makes it into my blog and vice versa.
The 140-character limit can also be frustrating. If you have ever engaged in an e-mail exchange using Twitter direct messaging, you know it can be disjointed. At some point, you need to jump to e-mail. That said, 140 characters does force you to focus your thoughts and to write succinctly,
Public conversations. Twitter gives everyone the option of making discussions public. You can’t do this with e-mail, and it’s difficult to accomplish on a blog. If you believe that your exchange with others would benefit from public input, or if you just want to expose the discussion to others, you have that option. You can always take things private via direct messaging if you wish.
Immediacy. When you just can’t wait for information, Twitter can’t be beat for getting your question to a large group. It’s impractical to do this with e-mail. People’s inboxes are already cluttered with spam and you have no way of getting your message to people you don’t know. Also, through “retweeting,” a message can reach a large number of people who aren’t on your follower list. This brings new perspectives to the conversation and gives you the opportunity to discover people you wouldn’t have otherwise met.
Retweeting. While we’re on the subject, don’t underestimate the power of the retweet. When someone picks up your message and forwards it to their followers, it magnifies your reach and often recruits new followers in the process. Sending provocative messages that others retweet is a great way to build your following and your contact list for information-gathering and promotion.
Discovery. Twitter is the most efficient mechanism I’ve ever seen for discovering interesting information. I could literally do nothing all day but monitor the “All Friends” feed in TweetDeck and read interesting articles that others recommend. If it weren’t for Twitter, for example, I wouldn’t have known that Travelocity has hotels in Las Vegas for $22 a night. This discovery process is not unlike scanning the pages of a newspaper, but it’s much faster and more encompassing. Also, you know that comments and recommendations from certain people will be of particular interest to you, so you have the option of drilling down on individual profiles to see what they’ve been saying recently. Chaotic? Sure, but that’s part of the discovery process.
Searchable. If you want to find out what people are saying about you right now, services like Twitscoop and Monitter enable you to instantly track mentions of your company, product, industry or whatever and to save them as RSS feeds for later browsing. You can do the same with Twitter Search. Google Alerts currently doesn’t index Twitter feeds, but Filtrbox does.
Twitter is a deceptively simple idea with remarkably powerful applications. People are only beginning to tap into its potential, and I hope visitors to this blog will contribute their own thoughts on what they find most compelling.
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Entries (RSS)
April 7th, 2009 at 5:34 am
Reminds me of the early days of the web before it became overrun with bloatware. Surfing was an apt metaphor. Web pages were light weight and easy to scan, and following links was often fruitful.
I think the key to high return on Twitter, is discovering, through search and referral, whom you want to follow.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:00 am
What a great article, Paul! This is a good one for sharing with our accounts who are looking for a strong overview.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
I can’t seem to ever get enough information on how effective Twitter is. I am a quick learner in most technologies and I know I will see the benefit of Tweeting some day but haven’t had enough success yet to really see it. I’m currently testing this medium to see how it might help raising money and awareness for some of the non-profits I’m involved with.
April 7th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
A superb article and explanation of Twitter. And being succinct is not all bad, in fact far better than verbosity. Guess it’s time to join the crowds – Twitter, here I come!
April 11th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
It took me some time also and I have been hooked on it for a week now certainly because I met heavy users. I noticed that I don’t subscribe to RSS but would rather follow twitter. I have to admit that I was wrong about Twitter, I thought it was a geek snob stuff.
April 12th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
No offense, but everything you just mentioned, you can do on Facebook, with more options, plus you already have your network set up. You can choose to make your entry public, viewable just by your friends (thousands in some cases), a handful of select people, ect. It can be one character long or paragraphs long. And Facebook Mobile takes care of those instances where all you have is your phone. I see twitter as something more for the over 30 crowd (as myspace is becoming). Most 20-somethings (“Milleniums” if you will, myself included) and teens that I interact with (I work in education) see twitter as somewhat redundant compared to FB.
April 18th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Great post, Paul! You’ve hit on all the reasons Twitter is such an exciting marketing tool. It took me about 4 mos to understand how to use it for what I wanted to achieve. I spent a lot of time just hanging out and listening to see how other peeps were using it and also how it would work with Facebook. Once I understood that, I jumped in.
In the first month, I noticed a big drop in the number of emails I get every day, and that’s continued. I now save at least an hour a day on email, sometimes more. Add in the immediacy of Twitter and the huge viral factor and it’s hard not to become a fan. One caveat: without an app to organize who you follow, Twitter is less than ideal. I find TweetDeck to be a must for organizing tweets into easily scannable columns. I can now drop in, scan my tweets and move on to other work. I love it!
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:01 am
[...] *get* Twitter?I’ll admit it, when our PR people started going on (and on and on and on) about Twitter, I wasn’t sure what to think. Could Twitter be a valuable tool for my company. And if so, [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 8:01 am
[...] *get* Twitter?I’ll admit it, when our PR people started going on (and on and on and on) about Twitter, I wasn’t sure what to think. Could Twitter be a valuable tool for my company. And if so, [...]
April 28th, 2009 at 4:01 am
[...] *get* Twitter?I’ll admit it, when our PR people started going on (and on and on and on) about Twitter, I wasn’t sure what to think. Could Twitter be a valuable tool for my company. And if so, [...]
May 12th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Please, can you PM me and tell me a bit more about this, I am really fan of your blog.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
It’s very simple folks…
Twitter is a Mac and Facebook a PC.
It gets the job done without the bloat, hassle or hype.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
[...] *get* Twitter?I’ll admit it, when our PR people started going on (and on and on and on) about Twitter, I wasn’t sure what to think. Could Twitter be a valuable tool for my company. And if so, [...]
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:20 pm
“I could literally do nothing all day but monitor the “All Friends” feed in TweetDeck” —- sounds like a waste of an entire day to me. Now I am leaving the house. Now I am in my car. Now I am opening my car door. Now I am exiting my car,,, lame man, really lame
July 24th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Not Into Twitter, you completely miss the point and clearly have not spent enough time reading what people post on Twitter to have an informed opinion.
July 28th, 2009 at 7:19 am
OK, found lots of info on how great twitter is, what it can do for you…I guess what I want is the mechanics, draw me a picture, really, do a diagram and show the relationships, show the flow of a typical tweeter, connect the dots. Maybe I’ll get it then?
August 3rd, 2009 at 6:41 am
“It’s very simple folks…
Twitter is a Mac and Facebook a PC.
It gets the job done without the bloat, hassle or hype.”
ha ha ha. “without the hype”? twitter is ALL hype.
twitter is merely the facebook status and nothing more. it’s almost like twitter is the outdated technology except for the fact that it is newer. the next step in twitter’s evolution would make it more complete, like facebook.
facebook works if you use it all day or once a month. twitter doesn’t work unless you’re using it all the time.
March 2nd, 2010 at 1:01 am
I tried grabbing the RSS Feed for this site but it is not properly showing up in Google Chrome. Any ideas?
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:16 am
Try this one: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PaulGillinsBlog-SocialMediaAndTheOpenEnterprise
August 28th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
I in fact resolved to just say screw the frustration of holding out months and years for a reasonable following and used a twitter followers program to obtain me 1k followers. They actually have all stuck around and I’ve obtained 40 retweets in the prior 7 days, 40 more than I had ever acquired before. Bliss. Really nevertheless there are a lot of these kind of fellas available, but I considered them high quality. Also you can find some no cost scripts and such in other areas but I’m not really a developer so won’t be able to rely on them.