A Tweeter in a Strange Land (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Twitter)
blog Sunday 15th of March, 2009
Everyone and their Mum has been writing about Twitter recently, thanks (in the UK at least) to Stephen Fry and Jonathan Woss bringing it to the mainstream's attention. I wrote about my own experiences with Twitter a few months ago, and I hadn't really intended to touch on the subject again. But, following a discussion on the subject on the MKMC mailing list recently, I thought it might be useful to put together a post pointing out some less obvious points about the service, with a view to helping a new user get the most out of Twitter.
A note to my usual readers — as this post follows up points made in a conversation on the MKMC mailing list, some of the later information discusses business use of Twitter. Almost all of the information here should be just as useful for individuals who aren't looking to gain any kind of commercial advantage from the service — but I would have been remiss if I hadn't mentioned these specific situations, given the original question. Normal service will be resumed presently.
Publishing or Messaging?
One of the most difficult things for new users of Twitter to grasp is what it's for. I have to admit that my own usage of it has gone through several discreet stages — after I first signed up, it was at least two months before I posted my first message. In Maggie Mason's excellent article on Twitter ettiquette, she writes:
“ With the usual exceptions, people on Twitter tend to fall into two main camps. There are responders, who use Twitter as a channel to interact heavily with other users, and broadcasters, who use it primarily as a micro-blogging platform. ”
Is Twitter a messaging service? You can send messages to other users, and other users can send messages to you. You can send these messages publicly, or you could send a private 'DM' or direct message that nobody other than the recipient will have access to. People who are following you will see everything you write publicly, other users will only see your messages if you address them directly.
Is Twitter a publishing system? Your content (aside from DMs, or if you choose to keep it private) is visible to anyone who finds it. It's searchable, indexed by Google, and can be linked to by any outside party who discovers it. You can even take your tweets and use them elsewhere (more on that later). You could also quite happily ignore every other user on Twitter, whether they follow you or not, using it solely for publishing whatever's on your mind.
In truth, it falls somewhere in between these two questions — sort of a 1.5-way system, taking cues from both one-way publishing and two-way messaging. A good way to think of it is as a mix of blog and comment — a tweet is essentially a discreet 'unit' of communication, 140 characters or under, whose context can be changed through its content:
- Unembellished, a tweet is simply a stand-alone post: Today, I'm writing about Twitter.
- Add a reference to one or more other users, it becomes a comment or reply: @semibad It will be interesting to see whether your post makes any sense...
- If you specify that your tweet is a private communication, then it is removed from the public timeline and becomes a message: d semibad Didn't want to say anything publicly, but your post was a mess!
Keeping it out of your face
If I were only to recommend one thing to improve a new user's experience of Twitter, it would be to get themselves a decent client program right away. A new user's first experience after signing up is the web interface, which is perfectly fine for posting your first message and finding a few acquaintances who already use the service. But really, Twitter is something that will be most useful when it's as transparent as possible. Ideally, you want tweets and messages to be relayed to you quickly and without fuss as they are posted — and you want to be able to post your own content just as easily. Conversely, when nothing is happening, Twitter should remain invisible — it's easy for services like this to turn into a productivity-sapping round of 'check my sites'! This is where a good client application comes in — helping you balance the useful, up-to-the-minute alerts with an efficient, transparent interface, and keeping Twitter out of your face when you don't need it.
There are loads of Twitter clients available, so there's bound to be one that's useful for you. Below, I've taken a quick look at a couple that are good for new users.
TwitterFox is a Twitter plugin for the Firefox web browser. It installs as a little icon in the bottom of your Firefox window, which can be clicked to access any tweets or messages you've received, as well as to post your own. Because it's a plugin, it does require you to be using Firefox — but because of this, it can also be used on any operating system. It's obviously most suited to those of us who constantly have a web browser running — I've been using it since I first signed up for Twitter, and find it very convenient.
Twhirl is a desktop based client. Again, it'll work fine on a Mac or a PC — it just sits in your taskbar and lets you know when you have new tweets to read. It can also be used with other social networks and multiple Twitter accounts — useful if you want to use social networking as part of a wider campaign for a specific product or named service.
Learning to listen
This isn't a beginner's guide to using Twitter — there's 1,000,001 of those out there, in addition to the comprehensive instructions. The point I want to address is that to a new user, publishing on Twitter can seem pretty counter-intuitive — and this is doubly true if you're approaching it as a promotional tool for your business or organisation.
Twitter doesn't provide a ready audience. When you write your first tweet, it's more than likely that nobody will read it — at least, not immediately! Those who have spent a bit of time with some other social networks might find it odd that even when you follow someone, it's a one-way deal — you'll receive their tweets, but unless they choose to follow you back, they'll not receive yours. I've always been under the impression that this is what puts a lot of new users off — there's nobody instantly available to talk at. But even if your overall goal is one of promotion, there's a lot to be gained from finding the right people to listen to.
Tools like RSS feeds have made it increasingly simple to keep up with what's happening in your areas of interest, whether business or personal. Twitter can help make this process even simpler — many major news sources can deliver bulletins via Twitter as stories go live. Even more useful, track down the top players and commentators in your own industry or areas of interest — often, news and early commentary ends up on Twitter well before it's published anywhere else, due to the ease of publication. If you do a little bit of homework and choose carefully, you really don't need to follow very many people to see some really useful results. The revolution may not be televised, but I'll be surprised as hell if it's not on Twitter within thirty seconds.
Finding a voice
Obviously, most people will also want to do some talking themselves. So how do you get a few followers of your own — and what do you do with them once they're listening?
- As with anything on the web, content is king, and so long as what you write is of interest, people will find you one way or another.
- Make sure you link to your Twitter page from your web site and email signatures — it offers another avenue for your contacts to keep up with what you're doing.
- If you read something that's really interesting, useful, or fun, then chances are other people will think so too — so post a link (and a short comment).
- Track down people who are interested in the same areas as you (the advanced search is your friend here) and make contact. There's great potential for networking, if that's your thing — if you're attending a conference or seminar, you can make contact with other attendees in advance and arrange to meet, or find out where any pre- or post- events are taking place.
- Keep potential (or existing) customers informed of what's going on in your business. Consider incentivising a company account by offering early-bird deals or special promotions which are only available to your followers. This also lets you interact directly with customers and suppliers — whether this sounds like a good idea obviously depends on your business, but it's a concept that's being tried out by more and more companies.
Taking it further
There's one last feature that's non-obvious to new users, but which I think is potentially extremely useful — portability. Unlike some other social networks, the data that you put into Twitter can be requested or manipulated by other sites and applications through an API. If this sounds a bit technical, don't worry — we're not going to go into 'here comes the science bit' mode. In practical terms, this means that even without worrying about followers, tweets, or any of the stuff I've written above, you (or your clients) potentially have an extremely simple way of publishing content to the web. Having one or more Twitter accounts linked to your blog or company's site is a great way of updating your content — a little and often. And as Twitter was originally built around microblogging from a mobile phone via SMS, this is perfect for anyone who wants to improve their web presence without being tied to a computer screen — update from anywhere, on any phone capable of sending a text message. Any decent web developer should be able to help you out with this — don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any further questions.
In addition to a convenient publishing outlet, this data can be used in a huge variety of other ways. There's a whole bunch of trend analysis tools available to allow interested parties to collect data from the public timeline, as well as apps of all shapes and sizes, which display the data in interesting ways.
So...
That's all I have to say on the matter. Only you are going to be able to say if this service is going to be of any use to you — and if so, in what context. There are a lot of people who use Twitter to improve their businesses, learn new things professionally or socially, or just as a small diversion. That said, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people for whom Twitter has very little to offer in any of these contexts. I've tried to show a few ways that Twitter might be more useful or interesting than you might think, so that you can make a considered decision about whether it has any worth to you or your organisation. Feel free to let me know in the comments below whether or not I've been successful, and don't hesitate to get in touch directly if you have any questions about anything I've written here.
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Reserves. Sunday 22nd of March, 2009.
Twitter eclipses other social networking apps in it's simplicity, but more importantly the immediacy in which it connects brands to people and/or people to people.
It takes some patience and experimenting to get it to work for you, since it can be utilized in many different ways, and all of our interests vary greatly.
I like the idea that it can be used simply as a news feed… especially with an app such as DestroyTwitter which has very thorough features and is one of the best Twitter clients available.