Re: Not Yet Twitter-Ready… Take Heart

Colleen, I’m jealous. Of you and Lev.

Hi, my name is Tom…and I’m a Twitter-holic.

I totally agree with your points about Twitter’s power of consumption. It’s an attention hog; and a time suck. But one area where I slightly differ is the question of whether people care about what you’re doing every minute of the day. One mistake I think people make in trying to define or understand Twitter is by equating it to…”it’s just like the status updates on Facebook…just ALL status updates.” I’m guilty of that myself. While it may have been designed to be that, and perhaps started out as that, it’s much, much more.

While it CAN be a status update of what you’re doing, it’s more effectively used as a tool to communicate what OTHER PEOPLE should be doing…or reading…or considering. It’s a collaboration tool. It’s conversation. It’s an electronic sounding board. It’s a discussion. I have no interest in the tweets that grace us with valuable nuggets of wisdom such as “off to get coffee with Joe, then to the gym.” Good for you. But that’s 3 seconds of my life spent reading that tweet, and I’ll never get them back. But if someone tweets, “Interesting article on how social media is generating e-commerce sales [with a link]” or “the top 10 most compelling brands, and why [with a link]”…that’s valuable information to me. I crave it, would read it, and use it to spur more discussion with the person who tweeted it, and others.

If you approach it with that thought process in mind, one might get more value out of it. And if you understand going in that, your (or your client’s) target audience might just be like Lev and Colleen and not have the time to devote to a life of twitterarti, you might be better armed with a strategy to leverage the site’s enormous powers of connectivity and collaboration. Or to know that you shouldn’t do it at all.