courtesy: wefunction.com
After listening to the Geek Girls on the Lori and Julia show today. It made me think of why I tweet. When I started my twitter account, just like most people that I know on Twitter, I didn’t know what I was in for. I figured that I would use it for a few weeks, feel it out, and then discard it. My situation was a bit different, since most of the people that I work with are on Twitter, and as soon as I was on I had people to follow and they in turn chose to follow me. Here’s the difference. I don’t have 63 coworkers (the number of followers I have as of writing this).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who bases my online-self worth on the size of my followers list, truthfully, I’m a little surprised that people follow me at all. I’m not all that interesting of a person. I test software for a living, I don’t have any kids, I have a cat (she plays fetch, back off :-p), I don’t travel all that much, and I’m just me. Maybe that’s the key to the whole thing. It isn’t one single tweet or one blog post that is going to identify me as a person worth following (or reading from). It’s the combination of all my tweets that when one of my updates appears in their timeline they don’t immediately unfollow me.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t have any services doing any sort of ‘automatic’ tweeting for me. I’ve unfollowed quite a number of people that have these services update their tweets for them. Maybe it works for them, and if I’m following a source like MinnPost or even TheOnion I expect the updates from them to be more often than people (even though MinnPost is updated by a person), I like what they post, and they don’t overdo it. By default there are 20 updates on your friend timeline. I get annoyed when someone I’m following consistently takes over 1/2 of that, less if they are all together. The same goes on Facebook for me (but that’s another post).
Tweets say what?!?
The whole idea of Twitter is “What are you doing?”. This has obviously expanded to “What are you thinking?”, “What are you reading?”, etc… One of the biggest reasons I unfollow people (or organizations) are if their tweets aren’t so much along those lines as they are self promotion, ego-boosting, or bragging (we’ll call those bleets). They get annoying. @lolife spoofed it best:
For those of you that know me, I’m not exactly the most serious guy. In fact, I try to make light of as much as possible as often as possible. At the same time though, if you have to think about what you are going to tweet for more than a few seconds (or minutes), you’re trying too hard. I have been guilty of this periodically.
Tweet reach
One of the first things that I hooked up to my twitter account was my facebook status. If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook, then you’ve noticed the ‘via Twitter’ after my statuses. It allows me to get my thoughts out to two groups of people at one time (two birds with one stone if you will). I don’t really know on either site how often my tweets are actually read, that part is all about timing. I follow 56 people. If everyone updated at the same time, I would miss out on 36 of those tweets. I suppose it is a good thing that not all of the people I follow update at the same time or I would miss out on their updates.
I try to keep up periodicially throughout the day, and while reading about what’s going on in my social circle is nice, having a job is better. So one of the things that I do when I get home and get my task list mostly complete is go through the timeline of the people that I follow and see what I may have missed throughout the day (usually quite a bit). It’s very interesting watching someone’s day start and end via an online service that only allows 140 character updates at a time.
Twit biz
I attended the monthly staff meeting at my company the other day, and @Nylons mentioned how she wanted us to get the word out about what we offer as a company, projects that we work on, our thoughts on Clockwork. While working here I’ve discovered that work can be fun and rewarding, and yet keep productivity to a maximum. We are by no means required to do this, but it’s fun. And this serves the business, of which I depend on for my livelihood, in a good way.
How can other businesses use Twitter to their benefit? I just said it a little bit ago. Don’t try so hard. If you set some ground rules like: No talking about clients currently being worked on, ones with Non-Disclosure Agreements, or proprietary information. There should be no reason why your employees wouldn’t want to talk about their time with you. Personally, it’s rather easy to talk about work. I spend at least a 1/3 of my time during the week there. I love working in the web services industry and therefore working for a web services company pleases me. Working for a company that recognizes this takes that a step further.
Businesses that are more ‘moving product’ orientated (aka retail), can still be served by a service like Twitter, however, not in the usual ‘retail’ way. It would annoy me to no end to follow a company that I thought was cool and am a regular customer of have their tweets be loaded with price-lists and a constant barage of sale notices. What I enjoy more is seeing detail about how the company works, what its employees are up to, etc. After all, this is ‘social’ networking, right? If I wanted ads, I’d sign up for their emails or have their site bookmarked. @Zappos is a great example of this. Their CEO is the one that updates this account, he’s actually kind of funny.
Bringing it home
Why does it matter that a company has a good idea of what I actually want to read? I grew up in a small town (yeah, the one with gnomes) and I knew the people running the stores downtown. After moving back there for a few years I got to know them not as ‘the guy who runs the butcher shop’ but more as ‘the guy I have a beer with periodically’. I felt like I knew him. Same as with Zappos, it’s a big company, but really, tweets are small, his are personal too. There’s a seemingly personal connection brought in that would otherwise never be there.
–dez (@iamdez)
For a how-to on twitter: Read Geek Girls Guide “Geek Chic of the Week: Twitter“