Twitip

By James Mallinson – Follow him @jmallinson

As useful and fun as Twitter can be, it can also be both addictive and a major distraction. Many times in the past I’ve tried to write a blog post or work on some other big project and I’d lose my focus because I had Twitter open and kept getting drawn to it, wanting to tweet something, see what others were tweeting or just reply to somebody. Of course, this is a common and well documented problem with most social media sites, but I’ve found Twitter to be particularly bad, if for no other reason that it’s so simple and quick to use.

It’s now increasingly documented that multi-tasking, and just generally allowing distractions into your life is a poor way of getting things done. If you’re tweeting while trying to do your work, that work will take much longer and require more effort to do. If you don’t want to waste your time like that, try implementing these four tips when using Twitter:

Set limits

The first, and perhaps most effective measure is to set limits. That could involve having particular days on when to tweet, setting time limits or even tweet limits (how many tweets you will make per day). Rather than dipping in and out of Twitter when it calls to you, putting aside perhaps an hour a day or choosing Saturday to use it when you know you’re going to be least busy, means you can really give your tweeting the attention it deserves, and thus shut it out of your mind the rest of the time. (more…)

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:

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