Twitter Observations, continued.

The more I use Twitter, the more I’m aware of the complexity of the whole nature of the follower versus the followed and how to manage my interaction on Twitter. There appears to be a multiplicity of variables at play in how the service is being used, and how it can be used, and the variables are all intertwined:

· How many people do you follow?
· How many do you tweet?
· Of those, how many respond?
· How many people follow you?
· How many contact you? How many do you respond to?
· How many do you tweet to? How many respond?
· How many people do you want to follow?
· How many followers do you want? And why?

I’ve been on Twitter for a few months now and continue to come to different conclusions on how this service is being used, and perhaps how it should be used. Folks seem to be falling into three groups:

1. Those aggressively seeking greatest number of followers.
2. Those following the greatest number of people possible.
3. Those with few of either, involved instead in small group communication.
4. Celebrities. Vast number of followers, variable number of followees, variable amount of interaction.

In the case of number 1, I’m not quite sure what is to be gained by getting a vast number of followers. I suppose if I had something to sell, this would be some way of getting my brand out there, but I’m not sure Twitter has proven this to be a viable goal. Eventually, you will invariably get to the point where you can’t interact with the number of people who follow you. This is fine if you are just using Twitter to broadcast stuff about yourself to your loyal followers, but it kind of controverts the core concept of Twitter; that of a social network application.

In the case of #2 above, it becomes difficult to manage the flow of tweets from such a large number of followed twitters, whether you seek interaction with them or not. This is kind of a voyeuristic approach to Twitter, but so what? There’s no user manual for Twitter.

In the 3rd case, we’re probably closest what sort of use was envisioned for Twitter by its developers. Groups of smallish networks of people involved in one project, for example, or the members of an extended family keeping track of each other. I would love to know how many of the millions of people using Twitter actually use it for this purpose.
In the 4th case, that of the celebrity Twitter, I’m guessing the Twitter developers probably got the most unforeseen response. I doubt any of them were supposing that someone like Ashton Kutcher could come along and garner literally millions of followers. Celebrities manage this differently. Some, as in the case of Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore, use it as a sort of informal bully pulpit, promoting social causes, playing pranks, all in a sort of informal manner that leads the follower to believe they are “talking” to them. All 3 million of them. Some celebrities with relatively smaller numbers actually do a pretty good job of interacting with their followers.

Twitter Do’s and Don’t’s

1. Don’t orphan your Tweets. When responding to someone, either RT (retweet) or include a reference to the original. If I post something and get a response 15 minutes (and 15 tweets) later saying “I agree completely!” I have no idea what you’re agreeing with.

2. Don’t broadcast Tys (thank yous) If your cat died, you tweet about it, and 5 people respond with genuine compassion, don’t send one tweet to all 5 of them saying “Thanks for your support”. That’s the Twitter version of a form letter.

3. Respond to ALL direct attempts to contact you. It takes about 2 seconds to say “Thanks!” in a Tweet. If you have too many followers to respond to, well, you have too many followers! What can you do about this? Send out a tweet to the world saying “I’d love to respond to each of you, but I’m currently getting ______ (fill in number of tweets directed at you) tweets per hour, and just can’t”. THEN (this is important) DON’T cherry pick who you are going to respond to. People will see this in their twitstream and know they didn’t hit high enough on your radar to warrant a response. This is drawback to Twitter and how it handles privacy. If you follow me you will see all my Tweets that aren’t DM’s. This is not initially obvious when getting into Twitter.

4. Be brief. Don’t seek to use all 140 characters each time. Doing so presents an obstacle to those who want to retweet you as they won’t have enough space.

5. Don’t tweet too much. If you set up an almost constant stream of tweets, people will go from reading them, to scanning them, to not reading them.

6. Don’t tweet too little. If you only tweet once a day, well, you’re just not interacting with your network enough to really even justify using it. It’s a balance thing.
I suspect that we, the users of Twitter, are really the ones setting the agenda for the future of this application. We are determining the future of Twitter. It will be interesting to see where it goes, especially with the exponential growth its currently experiencing.

Later.