Why Twitter Will Endure
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm a perfect example, I tried twitter like 6 months ago, tried it for a month, than gave up because there was just too much noise. I'm now back, but only because I use twitter to promote my own site. And since I now had an incentive to figure things out, I found things like tweet deck and lists that make things a lot easier.
To say that Twitter is a "land of marketers and bloggers and personalities pushing their own stuff" is like saying that telephones are only useful for telemarketers.
To say that Twitter is too noisy is like saying that there's nothing good on TV. If you don't like what's on _your_ TV you're free to put on whatever you like.
This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody gets that it's a communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting).
Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT, OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (http://bit.ly/, http://tinyurl.com/, etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator.
Sure it's different than other communication mediums, but it's not really solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire architecture essentially artificial limitations.
That's why there's a fair number of bloggers, personalities, spammers, etc on there.
the homepage only has 20 positions, and it doesn't discriminate whether that spot goes to someone who puts out 1 tweet a second, or someone who puts out 1 tweet a year. I had to make a list for a single person, just because I kept missing his tweets in all the noise.
The key value can be found in the @mention box on the right hand side of the interface. If people are making mentions with your name, that appears in your @mention box. Every time that happens that is an invitation for you to "ask a question".
Ask enough questions and in short order you will establish a relationship with a prospect. Ask the right questions and you will convert that prospect to customer status.
If you do this right, and your honest with the account, i.e. your profile, your twit background, and your tweets openly publicize your business status, you will be rewarded with 5-10 new leads a day who are actively interested in what you offer.
That begins by carefully selecting who you follow. Don't follow more people in a day than you can actively interact with in a single day.
Don't ask questions that are leading. Always ask questions that require a reply.
Don't press anyone who isn't engaged in the answers.
Always acknowledge the answers.
Take your time. Be patient. Offer value when asked.
I tell clients to imagine you have entered a coffee shop and every table is taken. Find an empty seat near someone who has a profile you think would make for an interesting conversation.
Be polite. Ask for permission to sit down. Do not talk about yourself. Ask questions. Learn what you can about your table mate. At some point that person is going to become actively interested in who you are. They will visit your profile, look at your tweets, click through to your site. And if you are providing value at any of the touch points they see, your going to convert many to follower status, and some to customer status.
And the best thing about this approach is that you never spammed anyone. The entire cycle began with them talking to you.
The only part of this method i left out is the step where you get them to mention back to you. I will leave that to your imagination. And if your a bright cookie, you will find a quick answer to that.
For those of you who find this methodology tedious, and too hard to sustain, GOOD. That's better for me. The barrier to entry is hard work. Every day.
And a bit of imagination.
The whole point is that there is just too much of a learning curve with twitter for regular people. Unless you start actively using twitter, you have no incentive to learn it.
We aren't talking about active twitter users here. We are talking about a new person, who just created their twitter account. Of course someone who is active on twitter knows about @username.
I agree it can be a useful tool for some but it has yet to sweep through and suck in most of my friends. Who are still on IRC, IM, email... All viable options and for me real time when I want them to be real time.
EDIT: word order ~
This is similar to Wave as well. Once I got my friends to use Wave, we use it for all kinds of things, from IM to group chat. Except in Wave, I'm not artificially limited to a sentence and a half of typing full of acronyms and shortened links. Heck, I can even inline post images.
Wow, entering text into a big fat field and pressing Enter is too complicated for end users?
I think your threshold is much too low.
* OK, I update my status fine. * How do I know who to follow? :/ * Whoah holly crap now I have 1000 tweets from idiots and spam and stupidity, how do I make this usable
etc
The character constraint forces people to say whatever they want to say concisely which I can see as being valuable - it's all too easy to otherwise get lost in the sea of data that is the internet. But that's about it.
How do people use it? Are most people using twitter from their laptop/PC or from cell phones? I can understand the need to keep messages small if you are using a hardware interface that provides a constraint on what you can practically write. But those limitations will go away in time.
I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less. I can see people putting up with SMS type messaging for now, but I'd bet they'll ditch it when they can buy a working star trek communicator.
Seriously, if anyone can provide me with the true enlightenment on this please do so. It sometimes seems as though I'm the only person alive who just doesn't get it.
The value of Twitter is entirely derived from those users you choose to follow. It's not all about banal updates about meal choices, goodnight wishes, and Twitter slang. But some people will post that stuff, so your course of action is simple: if these people bug you, unfollow them.
Pruning and managing your following list is an ongoing effort, but it can yield excellent results. I follow a wealth of different types of users on twitter - from tech journalists/commentators (@gruber) to startup CEOs (@jasonfried, @ev) to companies I deal with (@thinkgeek) to former university professors I’ve had (@edbarr) to friends and family. And that’s just scratching the surface.
These people provide me an interesting stream of updates on things that matter to me. You might not enjoy the same set of users, and that's ok, but that should be your end goal - develop your following list into something that provides you with value.
And you know what? You don’t even have to tweet. Build yourself a following list and consume consume consume. Not everyone is—or should be—a content producer. But Twitter gives you the option to be one, and if you're not, you can still benefit from the community at large.
I was going to call this a misconception. But, in fact, the answer is that Twitter is a high-bandwidth medium. For readers.
(It's more effort for writers, but who cares about us? There are orders of magnitude more readers than writers.)
It's true that I could dump a lot more raw information on you with a ten-second video Tweet than a 140-character text Tweet. But most of that information would not only be useless (you probably don't care to know the exact quality of the light falling on the bookshelf behind me, or how well I shaved this morning) but positively negative (because it will distract you, detract from my point, and tend to engage and distract many more levels of your brain, thus contributing to the mental cost of context-switching that is the bane of modern existence).
What I crave as a reader, among other things [1], is a source of plain-text links and messages (which can be followed up if desired) that are drawn from a body of people I vaguely trust, or their immediate circle of friends; that have been wordsmithed, at great effort, to pack the maximum content in the minimum space; and that have been arranged on a single screen that can be browsed without fuss or effort and that doesn't contain big blinky ads that have been engineered to be among the most distracting things ever made. And, what do you know, Twitter is a pretty good approximation of that, especially for events that are evolving in real time.
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[1] This is kind of an important point. Twitter is one tool, for one kind of reading. I wouldn't entirely give up blogs, or YouTube, or HN for Twitter, just as I wouldn't give up all books for Wikipedia.
m.google.com/reader
That's it. Everyone says that Twitter is all about who you follow, and that's necessary but not sufficient. But judicious use of @replies and @mentions (when you don't start your tweet with a @username so everyone can see it) is easily 10x more powerful for business and personal networking than LinkedIn, which I find 10x more powerful than anything else (meatspace meetups excepted, of course).
Of course, you can leverage Twitter to make your meatspace life better - where to go at conferences, a "hey, can we meet up" in advance of events, where the afterparty's at, etc.
If you think of Twitter as a business tool like LinkedIn rather than a personal tool like Facebook, you'll get a lot more out of it immediately. If you develop a decent following base that's actually paying attention to you, then you can do second-level stuff as "what is the best [x] for me given [y]" and get exceptional answers. But that only works once you've cultivated a good following.
Although the news reported in any particular tweet may not be reliable, you can easily examine many tweets (as they are short) perhaps taking into account follower count to try to figure out what's likely to be true.
At best, I get a link to a longer form of the news anyway on some other site (but usually with an impossible to decipher link shortener so I can't tell if the link is just spam anyways), usually to something I've already read and found through news aggregators or google news or some such anyways with more information and content.
For example, you could get real-time news on a conference.
For me, the one enduring lesson of Twitter is that if you build something that makes journalists and "public-relations professionals" feel important, you will get lots of free press.