What to Tweet

I’ve been refining and developing my Twitter style for a number of months now, and while I don’t claim to be any kind of expert Tweeter, I don’t think anyone really can. I mean, the app has only been around for a year or so, and nobody’s handing out degrees in it. There’s a lot of writing out there having to do with how to connect with people through following, but not so much on what to actually write about, so I thought I’d put down some of my observations.

Perhaps the biggest problem with getting started in Twitter is that at first you don’t have many people reading what you write. If you have a dozen followers, you may have less than 4 or 5 actually reading what you tweet. Of these 4 or 5, perhaps 1 or 2 will actually respond to your content. Because your first followers are probably pretty familiar to you, these tweets will tend to be about friends or family news, like “Are you going to Aunt Gladys’s birthday party next month?” Well, obviously you have to know who Aunt Gladys is, and care about her birthday to some degree, to even be able to relate to this tweet. I believe from what I’ve read that this was actually the original intent of Twitter; to provide for a little mini blog network of people who would all relate to the same people and events. You could speak in company or family shorthand, and everybody would know what you’re talking about. But then, as you get recommended to others, soon you have people following you who don’t know you at all, your family, your company, project, etc. So what do you tweet about? Popular topics read like the table of contents in your Sunday paper; Politics, news, views, culture, media, healh/wellness. This is where Twitter gets a little tricky, though. You still want to relate to the people you know in your immediate circle or original followers, but you also want to relate to a slightly broader audience. How do I “speak” in Twitter?

Developing a Twitter Voice

Some of my favorite tweeters handle this beautifully by blending personal messages with general interest tweets while still managing to sound colloquial at the same time. Imagine that you are hosting a small radio talk show with topics and questions coming in from people you mostly don’t know personally, but with whom you want at least a friendly interchange.

· Don’t lecture. Lecturers get unfollowed (by me, at least) pretty quickly. Twitter has become a great social media for political commentary. There is a fine line between commentary and lecture, but there is a line. Suggest, don’t command.

· Don’t speak in shorthand. In 140 characters, your challenge is to write something interesting and engaging while still remaining interesting to all of your followers. If you want to follow a thread with an individual, @reply them. Don’t post to your whole stream with something like “I can’t believe they think we’ll kowtow to this!” Who is they? Kowtow to what?

· Don’t be shy. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you’re thinking about. But when you do, make sure that you’re saying it in a way that will be interesting and relevant to all your followers.

· Have some interesting information. Either retweet something good or have something interesting to say. This doesn’t mean you have to be a White House reporter to come up with things of interest. I’ve read 140 character tweets from people who cracked me up explaining how they could not understand what their dog was trying to say to them. I’ve also been bored to tears by someone flatly reporting some epic event they attended.

· Use DMs. If you get involved in an ongoing discussion with another tweeter, remember all your followers are seeing the tweets. If it’s personal, or just not of interest to more than just you two, go to DMs.

· Don’t be too “quiet.” I follow a couple of people that tweet about once every three or four days. I follow them because a) I am related to them, or b) those tweets are very interesting (like coming from Air Force One).

· Don’t be too “loud”. Or frequent. You have to tweet enough to draw a crowd, but if you get to be like a circus barker, you will run the crowd off. Nobody wants to be in a conversation with someone who only talks and does not listen. Unless your famous and people want to hang on your every word, tweeting every 15 seconds about your life has got to be pretty darn interesting to hold people’s attention.

· Retweet, but not too much or little. Retweeting (forwarding and tacitly recommending someone else’s tweet) is a balance thing, too. It will gain you followers if done well, thoughtfully and actively, but too much is too much. Remember, people want to hear what you have to say, too. If you do nothing but retweet (and there are many) you better be really good at managing interesting content (and there are some).

· Abbreviate, but do it well. There’s a real skill to this. Tweetdeck actually has a pretty good tool for doing this for you, but I still abbreviate by hand. This is a balancing act, too. If you have so much to say such that you have to abbreviate too many words in a tweet, try rewording or breaking into two tweets. Overly abbreviated tweets get to looking like desperate telegraphed dispatches from the front.

· Be friendly, and where possible, personal. Bother to learn people’s names. Go to their profiles, learn about them. Engage. Simply using a person’s first name is an enormously effective tool in engaging someone. Many times, when people get a “bully pulpit” on Twitter through fame, notoriety, reputation, or whatever, they take on a sort of aloof, imperious tone. You better be awfully interesting to listen to if you take this approach.

· Tweet like somebody’s listening. Even if you are new and have just a few followers, develop a sort of conversational tone that sounds as if you are familiarly addressing a larger group of people. It lends an air of credibility. Don’t ever, ever, for any reason tweet either “Is anyone out there?” or “Hello? I’m bored. Is anyone listening?” They soon won’t be.

· Don’t admonish your followers. If you have a problem with what a particular tweeter or two had to say, address them in DM or at least in @reply. Don’t “blanket” your followers with admonitions. It comes off imperious and arrogant. The people you are really referring to probably won’t catch it, and the others will just be offended.

· Don’t Auto-tweet, auto-respond, ever for any reason. This is about interaction.

· If you are marketing something, attract people with tweets, not offers. If you have something interesting to say, I'l read it, even if you are selling something. If your only attempt to contact me is to spray me with offers, I'm not interested.

· Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t, for any reason, retweet the same tweet over and over. Even if you are not a bot and not auto-posting, you sure look like you are.

· Whenever possible, directly respond to ALL attempts to contact you. This is a core concept of Twitter, to me. Recently I had a surgery on a Friday and missed a whole “follow Friday” set of recommendations for people to follow me. I wound up sending out a general not-directed-at-anyone-in-particular tweet saying “Thanks for all the kind FFs”. I hate this. If someone took the time to individually recommend me, I feel I should reciprocate. If it’s simply an RT or an FF, I don’t feel this obligation. Twitter, to me, is all about interaction. There are plenty of people on Twitter (mostly famous folks) who joined with the notion that they’d use it as a networking tool, but soon found themselves followed by 100s of thousands of people who want to interact with them. Some handle this better than others. If you have 300 thousand followers, and you tweet that you attended a baseball game yesterday, and 387 people immediately ask you if you had a good time, of course you can’t respond to each. Rather than get defensive, distant, and aloof, perhaps it’s time to “close the door” (protect updates) so that people essentially have to follow the “friend request” model to follow you and ask for your approval. Perhaps it’s time to examine what Twitter means to you. If you have too many followers to relate to, perhaps FaceBook is a better solution. To me, one of the most disingenuous things a celebrity can do on Twitter is tweet really colloquial, personal stuff as if they are in a conversation, then reply to no one, (or one or two people). It comes off really manipulative and self-serving. I have followed a couple of lower level celebs with fewer than 2 or 3 thousand followers (there are tons of non celebs out there with ten times this number of followers) who followed almost no one in return and responded to no one. This has got to be the epitome of self-absorption. Unfollow. You are nowhere near as cool or hot as you think you are.

Twitter gets to be a bit like being at a large party. There are lots of people congregated in cliques talking about everything, laughing, joking, shouting, being obnoxious, being quiet and withdrawn. The trick is to manage to be engaged with as many people as you can at one time without appearing to be exclusive of people. Imagine you are at the center of one of the largest subgroups at a party. Several, if not many, folks are listening to what you say and some are replying to you. People from other nearby groups may even hear these conversations and may wander in. But remember that it’s a conversation, not a lecture. Don’t “hold forth” on a topic. This puts people off and acts as a barrier to engagement. Twitter is not very good for arguments. Flame wars 140 characters at a time, tend not to last long, and your followers get pretty tired of watching a mud fight pretty quickly. It’s too easy to block and unfollow contentious people.

So, you’re at the party. Hang around, introduce yourself to people. Initiate conversation. Listen intently and politely. Mingle. Move from group to group. Reply to everything said directly to you. If too many people are talking to you at once, maybe it’s time to go to a more exclusive party. But remember most of all that the coolest guy at the party is not the one who has the most people listening to him, or the one doing the most talking. He’s usually the guy in a spirited conversation with a few folks on a topic of interest to more than just a few, and he’s an avid listener as well as a good speaker.

Later.

Why I Follow (and Why I Don't) on Twitter

I find that as time goes by, my rules of engagement with Twitter evolve. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that Twitter itself is evolving. As more people join, and more people follow and are followed by more people, the systems we all develop for how we relate to each other evolve. But, I’m evolving as well. I’ve developed – or am developing, rather – a Twitter personality (for better or worse).

My simple rule for following used to be “If I follow you, attempt to contact you, and you don’t respond, I unfollow”. That’s still pretty true, but I’ve tempered the view to be a little more flexible. There are a few “news and information” people I do follow that don’t respond to me. My hard and fast rule about “this is a social networking application” is not so hard and fast anymore. But this is still very different to me then following some celebrity who posts updates to their life with no intention of ever interacting with their followers. And this is fine; there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not anything I choose to participate in. I’d rather pick up a copy of People.

I use to automatically follow anybody who followed me. This has shifted, as well, as the porn spam bots and the “I’ll show you how to get 100,000 followers a day!” tweeters proliferated. The first thing I do now when I get a new follower is to read a page or two of their tweets. You can get a feeling pretty quickly about what sort of Tweeter you’re dealing with this way. If the follower only posts once or twice a week, no follow. Here are some things I look for:

1. Do you only retweet? I still pretty much look for interaction on here, and with a few notable exceptions, “news feed” accounts like these don’t attract me much. If you do only retweet, it’s got to be pretty darn informational for me to follow. (And there are some. @raybeckerman, for example. Highly recommend.)

2. Are you selling something to me? I’m a “pull” rather than “push” consumer. I tend to seek out the things I want to buy rather than let them seek me. No follow. To me, it’s ok to use Twitter to “market yourself”, ie. Circulate your book idea, song, poetry, blog, as long as that’s not ALL you are doing. This is not the same as direct selling indiscriminately to me. We’re all trying to “market” ourselves in some way, after all. Just don’t let it be the only reason you’re using Twitter. (I’m looking for interaction.)

3. Do you only publish inspirational aphorisms? I have to say that these things all tend to blur together after a few days of reading them. Ghandi can’t possible have said all this stuff, can he? When was the last time you read one that was truly unique and new? They’re OK in small doses and when genuinely unique, but some folks do almost nothing but speak in aphorisms on Twitter. I was reading a stream of these between two Tweeters a few days ago, replete with “Good one!” and “Wow, where did you get this one!?” Like dueling aphorisms. Appears shallow, insincere and vapid after a while.

4. If your tweets are totally focused on getting me (and you) “100s of followers a day”, we probably don’t have much in common. Why would I want 100s of followers a day if it weren’t for the purpose of selling them something?

5. If you are a “life coach” I’m not much interested. My life coach has a few letters after her name (LPC, MA.) Call me old fashioned, but there are some things I think you ought to be government certified to do, and this is one of them. And I certainly didn’t find her through a free internet social network application.

6. How many people do you follow? If you already follow 10,000 people and your bio says you’re a “social networking media guru”, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to miss my tweets if I don’t follow you. Again, looking for REAL interaction.

7. Are you in stealth mode? I understand that identity theft is a big issue, but if it’s that big an issue, perhaps you shouldn’t be using the internet for social interaction. If you have no name, no location, no profile, why would I want to follow you? Again, it’s about interaction. Still, I have some great twitter friends who are in stealth mode, but they sought out real interaction with me first. That’s the key. I have only asked for one permission to follow a protected updates account, and that was because she was referred to me. This is too much like the FaceBook and MySpace “friends request” deal which is antithetical to the whole Twitter experience to me.

8. Are you following me in response to something I said? I will almost automatically follow someone in this case. A “blind follow”, or a follower who found you by bot doesn’t present much of a promise of interaction to me.

9. Do you have anything interesting to say? To me, this is the number one reason to follow, perhaps even above and beyond the chance of interaction. But more importantly, the question I ask is “Do you have anything interesting to say to me?”

10. How much do you tweet? Too much and too little are key to me. If you tweet once every 15 seconds or only once a week, I’m not much interested in you feed.

11. Do you have “auto this and that” turned on? There are some accounts that spit out tweets ever couple of minutes that are obviously coming out of some canned app. The same tweet will recycle every couple of minutes. Like following an answering machine.

Looking at this list, I think there are two keys to following. Interaction is certainly most important. Informational can trump this, but the information has to be from someone really interesting, or be in itself very unique and informational. I really think the very core concept of a social networking application is direct interaction, and choose to use Twitter this way. Your mileage may vary, though!

Later.

A Child's Ghost Story

Sometimes a story coming from a child bears greater weight than if it came from a college professor. Something about the pure simplicity and innocence of a child’s story lends it gravity. Sure, kids can fabricate from whole cloth, but this is almost immediately identifiable. A child generally doesn’t have the language skills and sophistication to fictionalize convincingly, which makes a non-fictional story from them all the more convincing.

We were riding home from a vacation a couple of years ago, passing the time telling ghost stories. My daughter, who was then about 8 years old began telling us of something that I at first took to be a dream, even though she insisted it wasn’t. She proceeded to tell the story, which, although I remember it clearly, I still managed to file away as a sort of half remembered dream. Fast forward a couple of years. Under similar circumstances – another long car trip – the subject came up again. If you ever want to really fact check a child’s story, ask them to retell it a few years later. She recounted the incident to us, almost verbatim, and I confess to a slight chill running through me. Here it is, my best attempt to tell it in her now 12 year old voice, with my questions interjected:

“You know how you are when you’re just about to fall asleep, not really awake, but not really asleep? I was in my old bed at mom’s house which looks right straight out at the hallway where the fish tank used to be. There was a little girl standing there. I wasn’t afraid, but I knew that I was no longer asleep at all, and actually leaned up on my elbows. She was about 7 or 8 years old, long blonde hair, but the ends were curly. She had a dress or nightgown on. I couldn’t tell which. It was either a frilly nightgown or an old style dress. She was standing looking at the wall.”

“Could you see her face?”

“Oh, yeah. I could see everything about her. It was like she had her own light. It wasn’t like she was glowing, but not really. It was like she was in light, but there was no light there. It was dark in the hall. And it wasn’t like she was glowing, because she wasn’t giving off any light on anything around her. She looked confused, like she was lost. She had a blanket or something like it in her hand, hanging over her arm and it looked like she was trying to figure out which way to go.”

“Did she move?”

“Yeah, she turned and looked at me!”

“You’re kidding!?”

“She looked right at me, we looked at each other, and she was just as surprised to see me as I was to see her.”

“And you weren’t afraid.”

“Unhuh. Not even after.”

“What do you mean after? What happened next?” (I was totally enthralled at this point.)

“She took a couple of steps towards me. It wasn’t like she was walking on the floor, though. Not like she was gliding, but walking, but it was like her feet weren’t where the floor was.” (I remember the chill I felt when she said this).

“Did she approach you?”

“Just a little, but then she just wasn’t there. Not like she faded, or vanished or anything. Not like anything I can explain. She just wasn’t there anymore. The hall was dark and empty, but I don’t remember her going away or anything. Just not there.”


I drove for a while after hearing this story a second time imaging it, trying to put myself in the scene, imagining my daughter laying there in some sort of communication with a girl about her age. Perhaps that’s why she saw her. My dad instinct kicked in and I felt a pang of concern for this little girl, lost, with her blanket. Perhaps she was looking for her daddy.

Later.