QOTW: why do, or why don't, you use Twitter?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dave Collins on December 4, 2008 at 11:47am

Hi Neil,

At risk of sounding old, I just don't understand how it works.

I understand the concept, in terms of what it is and how you're supposed to use it, but I don't see how to make it worthwhile for your business.

Is it simply a live version of LinkedIn? And why would people want to know that I'm drinking my second cup of coffee today?

And if the idea is merely to share good information, thoughts and resources, wouldn't a company blog be better suited to the task?

I'm in the process of experimenting with it for a few months, but so far (only a few weeks in) it's not impressing me.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Dalgarno on December 4, 2008 at 12:02pm

I've recently started using Twitter (http://twitter.com/MarkDalgarno) but don't have a good feel for it yet.

I think it's useful to get a sense of a person in a way that other approaches don't allow for and I've no doubt that if you're working closely in a (distributed) group it can help bring the group together.

I've done a bit of research on Social Media in the past couple of months and Twitter use cases (primarily drawn from the educational sector) include:

- Instant Feedback
- Track a conference / seminar
- Follow a professional / famous person
- Public notepad
- Collaborative writing assignments, e.g. storytelling
- Grammar (improvement)
- ‘Maximizing the teachable moment’
- Platform for metacognition – forces people to be brief and to the point (Class chatter - http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/)
- Collaboration
- Newsflashes, alerts and reminders
- Organisational Marketing
- Virtual Water Cooler
- Serendipitous relationships
- Link sharing

Mark

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Permalink Reply by Jamie Grove on December 4, 2008 at 1:29pm

Twitter doesn't make a lot of sense until you dive in. I tried it twice before it stuck and now I use it all the time for a variety of reasons:

1) Twitter is a good place to post things that would otherwise lay dormant in my journals.

For example, I read a lot (and by a lot I mean more than is probably healthy for anyone). So, I run a fantastic number of great quotes. My blog is dedicated to long posts about the writing life and so short quotes really don't fit in, except in the margins. However, on Twitter, there is a huge audience for quotes.

2) Twitter is a great place to find new and interesting content.

I tweet a lot of fun links, but I also find an incredible amount of content from the people I follow.

3) Twitter gives me a chance to test out new material.

Think of you have interesting idea? Try tweeting about it for awhile and see what sort of feedback you get. It's the kind of live audience you can't get with a blog. Very helpful for tuning ideas before you go to the trouble of writing a post.

4) Traffic.

Yes, it works but only if you share things that are valuable and in return help others you honestly feel are sharing great content too. Twitter is very sensitive to spam and garbage. You'll get unfollowed lickety-split if you abuse the trust.

5) Fun.

I've been an online chatty-patty since 1990 so Twitter is kind of a natural for me anyway. I enjoy the party.

6) It's interesting.

I think most people try twitter and give up because no one responds immediately when you are just starting out. The key thing is to relax. Start by finding people who share a common interest by using the search feature. Follow them and they will likely follow in return. Try to keep your follow/followers ratio close to 1:1 and grow it at a modest pace. Reply to others tweets, be a friend, and pass about great links. Soon enough you'll have a pile of people - and that's when Twitter gets interesting.

Hope to see you around!

- Jamie
@hownottowrite

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Permalink Reply by Dave Collins on December 4, 2008 at 1:55pm

Interesting ideas all round. And some good tips.

My question: How does a business benefit from this? Or is it just satisfying for those who post? And if this is the case, then what advantages are offered by Twitter over a blog?

I understand that it's interesting. But is it practically useful?

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Permalink Reply by Adriana Iordan on December 4, 2008 at 1:59pm

Neil,
I am so glad you opened this discussion!

Let me share some of my Twitter experience so far (twitter.com/adriana_iordan). I had several presentations about Twitter and social networks media and though I see a lot of people reluctant to it, I feel that Twitter is an incredible business tool.

To mention only some of the reasons why I use Twitter:
1. connections - I cannot believe how many people share my interests :) , stay in touch with people I meet at events
2. market research - I can get feedback easily, answers to my questions
3. competition analysis - use search.twitter.com / http://tweetbeep.com/ etc
4. reputation management / feedback about our industry, company, competition / search engine reputation management as well
5. event promotions, Article & blog posts promotion -- traffic to the website (see real numbers in this post about how to measure social networks business value: http://blog.avangate.com/tracking-social-networks/)
7. Ideas for new content / updates / features - research tool
8. personal & company branding
9. transparency / build trust among our customers / I am a real person and not a generic email address
10. the possibility to interact with PR & Bloggers / answer to their questions / suggest topics
11. selective resources / I rely more on recommendations from the people I admire than the general RSS feeds

And all in the 140 characters.

See some examples of other software companies using Twitter to their benefit:
http://twitter.com/vmwarefusion
http://twitter.com/SunNews
http://twitter.com/37signals

I can go on for a very long time.. :)
@adriana_iordan

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Permalink Reply by Brian Hartsock on December 4, 2008 at 3:29pm

I see it very simply.

Twitter succeeds where blogging fails because it gets people communicating easier. When you go to write a blog, it is usually a chapter out of a novel that has to be perfect. You spend hours carressing a paragraph, rewriting a sentence, phrasing something just perfect. Twitter doesn't have that barrier. Just do it and forget it.

I still think Twitter is just noise and have instead dedicated myself to writing more on my blog and not trying to make each post a Pulitzer prize winner.

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Permalink Reply by Peter Shire on December 4, 2008 at 3:56pm

To my team at SQL Sentry, Twitter allows amazing insight, interaction & connection w/ our primary audience. I equate it to a beer w/ friends. (oh that’s 141 characters!)

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Permalink Reply by Mike on December 4, 2008 at 4:33pm

I've been on Twitter for a few months now. I, like many here, didn't really see the point and I still have some reservations about it, but here's a couple of my likes and dislikes.

Things I like about Twitter:
Subscription model: I don't have to hit everyone's twitter pages, I follow them and they come to me.
Twitter clients: If you're just using the website, you're probably not going to keep up. Until I got a good client, it was pretty hard to find value. I currently use TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/) but there are many out there depending on your needs.
Social Networking: Two aspects here... getting updates from people you might not otherwise interact with on a daily basis (reconnecting with old friends/coworkers) and following updates from people you admire (people like Jeff Atwood (http://twitter.com/codinghorror), Scott Hanselman (http://twitter.com/shanselman) and Neil Davidson (http://twitter.com/NeilDavidson ... okay, I'm sucking up a little bit ;) ). It's a good way to "get to know" these people in a non-threatening way.

Things I don't like
Time: Like all content, it takes time to read and sift through. Yes it's "filtered" by who you are following, but it can still be a lot of info. For instance I unfollowed Guy Kawasaki (http://twitter.com/guykawasaki) because, while interesting, there was a lot of stuff there that, at the end of the day, didn't really matter to me.
Attention: It requires your attention NOW. The thing that I like about blogs is that they are mostly asynchronous (RSS notifies me when there is new content but I read it when I'm ready) while twitter is more immediate... which I guess is the appeal, but it goes back to Time.
Short messages: Yeah, I get that that's the whole point, but it lacks depth usually... which I guess is why you tweet links.
Kinda pushy businesses: Businesses or blogs that follow me in order to notify me of their existence so that I will follow them are a little bit annoying. I guess it's a good tool from the business side, but my thought is "are you really interested in what I have to say or are you just trying to get me to listen to what you have to say?"

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but a good overview of my feelings towards twitter.

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Permalink Reply by Mark on December 4, 2008 at 4:33pm

because the barrier to communication is already so low I'm drowning in the noise,

because quick, easy and short equates to cheap, cursory and irrelevant,

because we need to spend *more* time studying, researching and sharing *less* information,

because it is use is for purposes (a) narcissistic, (b) self-serving, or both

because the most valuable resource in my life is the uninterrupted block of time, and twitter et al would love to take that from me.

because I just spent 15 minutes and many characters in an attempt to communicate why I don't use Twitter. Could you imagine how much weaker my tenuous arguments would be given only 140 chars and 12 seconds of thought?

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Permalink Reply by Mike on December 4, 2008 at 4:38pm

The flip side of the "tweet and forget" ease is that people forget that it's still out there with a permanent link on the internet as long as twitter is up. Less thought goes into it which, yeah, I guess is a barrier, but it removes the junk.

Brian Hartsock said:

I see it very simply.

Twitter succeeds where blogging fails because it gets people communicating easier. When you go to write a blog, it is usually a chapter out of a novel that has to be perfect. You spend hours carressing a paragraph, rewriting a sentence, phrasing something just perfect. Twitter doesn't have that barrier. Just do it and forget it.

I still think Twitter is just noise and have instead dedicated myself to writing more on my blog and not trying to make each post a Pulitzer prize winner.

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Permalink Reply by Lou Franco on December 4, 2008 at 4:42pm

I signed up to twitter specifically to keep friends in the loop on the 2008 Business of Software conference (there was a lot of interest among the developers I know). I took my notes right into Twitter and realized that Twitter is a really good place to keep my notes from public events. You can check out @loufranco to see my Tweets from BoS08 --- I didn't know about # marking until part way through.

Now I use twitter for that and for sharing what I'm up to -- it's a good way of having some idea of what people are working on without feeling like I need to reply.

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Permalink Reply by Carl Schmidt on December 4, 2008 at 5:25pm

I'm a very intermittent twitter user (http://twitter.com/carl_schmidt). I *would* use it more, as long as I could filter some of my tweets. For instance, I'm quite used to keeping a running journal, especially for time tracking, and twitter seems like a place where I could do that, but I don't want *everyone* to see *all* of my time tracking entries.

To answer Dave's question, time tracking is one possible use case for twitter (check out http://tijsvrolix.be/2008/05/17/twistory-now-supports-time-tracking...).

Further, I could see it being very useful in a distributed team working environment as a means of getting some of that more casual interaction going on.

Ultimately, I could see it becoming somewhat of a "thought merging/de-duplicating" mechanism for the crowd. Seriously, wouldn't it be cool if the webernet can put me in touch with like-minded people when I tweet something like "looking for life beyond Java"? How about if I could just tweet business ideas and get connected to folks who are trying the same thing, or want to?

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