Today Dennis Goedegebuure from The Next Corner (follow him at @TheNextCorner) makes some predictions about Twitter in 2009.
2008 showed an unbelievable growth for Twitter as THE place for microblogging. With competitors like Pownce closing their doors, it seems that Twitter has the stronger cards to become the sole survivor in this field.
The Twitter ecosystem is expanding so fast, that the switching costs for users are becoming even higher the more they get connected in the network. Twitter has the network advantages. For Twitter I expect the break into mainstream will come in 2009, if their server park can handle the load!
What’s Your Twitter Agenda? In this post Snow (follow her @snowvandemore) from el vigilante shares 10 Twitter agendas.
I imagine there are written guidelines somewhere on how to conduct yourself on Twitter, but I haven’t read them and I don’t intend to. I’ve always believed in learning by doing and my first few weeks on Twitter have been an eye-opener. My conclusion — it’s all about agendas.
Fortunately, recognizing someone’s particular Twitter agenda is not that difficult. Just go back through their tweet history and a common thread will likely emerge.
Here are some examples of Twitter modus operandi I’ve witnessed so far:
1. Blog vomit
Twitterfeed will post your blog rss feeds to Twitter automatically and there are Twitter members that use the site purely for that reason. Personally, I see nothing wrong with that, but if you don’t invest some effort in following and conversing with like-minded Twitter members, you might as well be broadcasting to Mars, because no one will notice you.
2. It sucks to be you
I could spend all day watching these people’s tweets. The Buffies and Biffs can’t wait to let you know which expensive wine they just drank, the $1000 suit that had to be returned because it wasn’t up to snuff, and mentioning as many SEO Internet moguls as possible in their tweets, in the unlikely event some of the twinkle will magically rub off on them by osmosis.
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:
