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Top 5 - Personal Twitter Do’s and Don’ts

by Amanda Shiga on October 3, 2008

I was inspired by Bryan Person’s post Are your Twitter posts only and always about you to write this quick list of my personal Twitter pet peeves. When I’m deciding whether to follow somebody, these are the things I usually look for, and try to avoid myself.

Disclaimer: We don’t all use Twitter the same way, or for the same reasons. Take lightly and salted.

  1. Twitter is about networking, community, interaction. That said, be conscious of @ reply usage. If your @ replies are only meaningful to their recipient, you are diminishing value for the rest of your followers. Limit these, or explain them, or DM.
  2. Twitter asks “what are you doing now?”. Don’t take this too literally. Reporting your ongoing experience at a conference is great; giving a play-by-play of your daily commute is not. Balance the volume of tweets and their “about me/not about me” ratio.
  3. Make sure your Twitter bio clearly conveys who you are. If you are a web/media/marketing professional, or an artist, or a dabbler, let the Twittersphere know! Don’t make me guess who you are, or have to visit your website to find out. Your bio should be a hook.
  4. Only swear very occasionally. It’s a turnoff. If you must emphasize a point, try to use asterisks and your followers will still get it.
  5. And the golden rule: focus on adding value for your followers, while still letting your personality emerge. I follow people to build connections and tap into their unique insights and experiences. Make sure your tweets provide something useful or helpful.

What are your Twitter Do’s and Don’ts?

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Twitter - sliced and diced

by Amanda Shiga on September 21, 2008

Twitterholic is fascinating. It lists the top hundred Twitter users based on # followers, # friends and #updates, and gets updated a few times a day.

Who has the most followers? Surprise - Barack Obama, followed largely by prolific members of the tech/startup/social media world with a few news outlets and wildcards such as Darth Vader. It would be interesting to find out if this popularity is due to actual value of tweets (entertainment or professional), or fame, or some other metric.

Who has the most friends? Again, Obama takes the lead. The #friends on the list ranges from 85,000 to about 5300, which begs the question - how can you possibly follow that many tweets? To an individual user, it seems the point of diminishing returns might come well before those numbers. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a different kind of value in this volume, such as for analytics or research purposes.

Who tweets the most? Less surprisingly, this list is dominated by news and radio outlets. However, the location range is MUCH broader than in the first two lists, where the majority listed were from the US. In this list, users come from all over the world - Japan, Spain, Venezuela, Lebanon.

There’s all sorts of interesting analysis that can be done here. A number of sites already exist that slice and dice the usage in various ways - summed up nicely in this blog post from Flowing Data. The most personally useful is probably Tweetstats, which graphs activity in realtime on any Twitter user.

Of course, Google Trends provides great overall usage stats as well.

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The power of Twitter: conference eavesdropping

by Amanda Shiga on September 17, 2008

I had the privilege of briefly tweeting this week with some attendees of the ALI Social Media for Government conference in Ottawa. While I’m sure they’ll be blogging like mad about the event, I wanted to share some of the impressions I got on Twitter and what a force of connectivity this tool really is! Also worthy of note: how much social media has already been exploited by Canadian and American governmental agencies. I had no idea.

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Yammer explosion

by admin on September 14, 2008

Yammer, winner of this year’s Techcrunch 50, is “Twitter for the enterprise”. Simply put, it is a microblogging tool that limits users to a single email domain and is not accessible to the public. I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter, so when a coworker set this up for our company yesterday, I was intrigued.

At first, the only participants were the usual suspects - a small group of social media enthusiasts within our company. But… it took off like wildfire! By the end of the day, we had 16 participants and over 100 yams (is that like tweets?).

What was really neat was that the post value stayed pretty consistently high. Our free-wheeling discussion included Sharepoint behaviour in Chrome, various client projects we were working on, and how we liked the service itself. Nobody got too silly - perhaps because Yammer has the feel of a lunchtable discussion where the whole company is present.

Although Yammer has been slammed for being a Twitter clone, they seem to be doing things right in these early days. They seem to have an almost instantaneous response rate to tweets and forum posts, probably due to the massive publicity off TC50, and an API is due out soon. Their AIR-based desktop client is a joy to use.

That all being said, it remains to be seen if the tool will persist in value over the coming weeks. A question was raised about why the adoption rate at our company was so fast, compared to some other tools we’ve tried out. I hope these reasons can make it last, even just for a while.

  • instant collaboration, especially between our two office locations
  • minimal commitment (quick and easy to participate)
  • audience limited to a private network
  • the feel of a round-table discussion
  • novelty

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Twitter evangelism

by admin on September 14, 2008

I have an inspiring coworker to thank for my recent “Twitter conversion”. I used to be a skeptic, and my line of thinking was similar to the following comments I’ve heard:
  • “Why wouldn’t I just use MSN [messenger] for quick conversations?”
  • “I don’t see the point.”
  • “It’s too much of a bother to update and read.”
  • “I don’t have time.”

When you first see Twitter, it may be hard to see the point. Some people tweet about daily inanities like breakfast and the weather. But Twitter really shines when you forget about chatting with your friends and up the ante. The real value lies in the professional realm.

Find a big name in your industry who links to a Twitter account from their blog. (To be fair, this is easiest in the web space, from whence Twitter was borne, but other areas are gaining ground).

From there, check out their lists of Followers and Followees. You’ve just hit a goldmine of names to follow on Twitter, and chances are they’re all tweeting about conferences, trends, news articles, research and other people in their space. Guaranteed most of them have blogs, too.

If you’re really lucky, some of them will start following you as well, and you can initiate discussions with formerly inaccessible analysts, CEOs and gurus. You can also help out others who are looking for answers or connections.

I can’t enthuse enough about how much I’ve learned from my Twitter network. As more people follow me, I can start sending questions into the Twittersphere and see what responses I get. I can also post information I feel would be helpful to my network. It’s all a big positive feedback loop!

Tom Barrett has written a fantastic post about Twitter as a learning tool - highly recommended read. http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2008/03/29/twitter-a-teaching-and-learning-tool/

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