Hey folks, just wanted to make mention of a few suggestions some of you have made through the contact form for Twitter related sites and tools to check out. Many of these I’m sure you probably haven’t heard of yet. We get SO many of these, that I’ll likely be posting some every week. – Lara
Virgil Vo writes:
I’ve just recently created a new Twitter Application called Listento.fm. You can share both music and video files on Twitter. All you have to do is cut and paste a direct MP3 link or a YouTube/IMEEM link, as well as supplying the name of the artists and the title of the song. Upon doing so, a media page will be created and you can then share it with your followers.
I really enjoyed the post from Sonny Gill yesterday exploring the idea of Broadcasting vs Conversing on Twitter. I think he’s on the money and new Twitter users can learn something from his suggestions – however I wanted to ask the question today:
Is it OK to use Twitter as a Broadcasting Tool?
The reason that I ask the question is that while my main Twitter account (@problogger) is pretty interactive – my secondary one (@digitalps – one connected to my photography site) is not – it’s almost purely used as a broadcasting tool.
Not only do I use it for broadcasting – I don’t follow anyone with the account and yet it still has over 1000 followers. Every day a new tweet automatically goes up on the account pointing to a new post on my blog and every day that tweet sends around 100 people to my site).
While I suspect if I were to use that Twitter account more conversationally that it could be even more effective (it is one of my goals at some point) at this point I’m relatively happy with how it’s working – particularly considering I’ve never really promoted @digitalps beyond a couple of tweets and a single post on my blog.
The other reason I ask the question today about using Twitter as a broadcasting tool is that as I look at the top 10 users of Twitter (in terms of how many people follow them) I notice that 3 of the top ten also use Twitter purely as a broadcasting tool. They have 117,025, 51,030 and 36,168 followers.
While they are either famous or have incredible reach in other ways already – they’re sustaining massive amounts of followers and never really interact with any of them (at least not publicly).
I’m not writing this post to suggest that we should all just use Twitter as a broadcast tool – but I guess I wanted to say that it can be done quite successfully – in some circumstances.
So When is it OK to use Twitter as a Broadcasting Tool?
Let me suggest a few times that ‘broadcasting’ might be appropriate on Twitter:
Broadcasting or Conversing on Twitter? Sonny Gill shares with us some tips on how to have Conversations rather than be a Broadcaster.
So you want to join the Twitter. You think of a cool username, sign up and get excited at the thought that you have complete freedom (140 characters worth) to tweet about whatever you want. You seek out the most popular Twitterers and start following them along with hundreds of others. How simple, you think. Now, the time has come for your first tweet:
“Hey all! Check out my blog www.pleasereadmyblognow.com!â€
Hmm, no responses and not many people following you back. Let’s try that again:
“Glad to finally be on Twitter all. Leave some love on my latest post!â€
Ok, we get it – it’s about you. Unfortunately, other people aren’t as accepting to your philosophy and won’t listen to you. Why, you ask? It’s because you’ve become a broadcaster – someone who constantly tweets about themselves and their blog/site. You fail to get involved with the community and end up providing little to no value to your network.
Wait – don’t give up on Twitter already because no one is listening to the broadcaster in you. As with any network, group or forum, there are always basic cultural mores to understand that’ll help you become a better communicator. Twitter has a few of its own that will help your experience:
