Messages exchanged during conversation are not stored or published on the web or anywhere else.

Bidirectional relationships (people followed and following you) are set as chat friends so if you are a massive twitter user with tons of followers don’t expect to see them if you are not following them. Unfortunately, this service is probably unusable with classic client software if you have thousand of bidirectional relations.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter XMPP Instant Messaging with Treegger

For newer Twits, it may very well be. For those of us who were “early adopters”, we’ve got clearly different experiences. I remember Twitter before every television show and celebrity and news station had a Twitter account. Before every business went to crazy lengths to get followers. And before it became a place over-run with teenagers Tweeting about crazy sexual stuff. I remember when it was truly a networking place between colleagues, old and new. It was fun to go and see what some of the people I look up to in my field were reading or writing or talking about.

My personal feeling? There’s lots of clutter in Twitter these days. People who follow you in hopes of you following them back so they can increase their follower count, only to unfollow you if you don’t reciprocate, or once they’ve got you following them.

What do you think? Vote, and then discuss your answer in the comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Poll & Discussion: Is Twitter Still Awesome?

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.

Identify what you want to achieve

You like Twitter. You use it regularly. Why? Why are you craving all those followers and tweeting fifty times a day? So many people use Twitter without understanding what they’re getting out of it. Are you trying to promote a product? Make new friends? Interact with interesting people? Identify what you want to get out of your Twitter experience so that you can tweet with purpose and focus. Tweeting for the sake of it is a very easy-but-bad habit to slip into.

What value are you offering?

Sorry to say it, but the vast bulk of tweets are irrelevant. Tweeting every little thought and activity you have and do is pointless (and it has indeed caused Twitter a lot of ridicule in the past). If you think a little before each tweet as to whether it has value, meaning and worth, both to yourself, your followers and the wider audience, you will make your overall Twitter experience and the time you put into it much more satisfying and meaningful.

Cut out distractions

When I originally downloaded Tweetdeck, as useful as I found it to be, it was initially also a big attention whore. Beeping every time it updated, refreshing every couple of seconds… it was so distracting, it was difficult to not be drawn away from whatever else I was doing. I’ve now tamed it to the point where I can look at it when I want to. The same goes for whatever app you use, including any email notifications you might get from Twitter. And of course if that doesn’t work, just use the golden rule – close Twitter until you’re ready to use it!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Tame The Beast: How To Use Twitter So It Doesn’t Suck Up Your Time And Attention

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:

1. When users know what they’re getting – what strikes me about each of the examples that I’ve used above is that each account has not been used as an interactive tool at any point in it’s history (or at least in my memory of them). When people sign up as followers of these accounts they can clearly see by the archives of tweets from the account that there is no interaction. They know what they’re getting (ie that this is a ‘broadcasting type twitter account) when they sign up and opt into receiving those tweets.

When ‘broadcasting’ becomes dangerous is when you change the rules on your followers and go from using Twitter purely as a conversational tool to using it purely as a broadcasting one.

2. When you’ve got something worthwhile to broadcast – a Twitter account used solely for broadcasting will be increasingly attractive to followers as the quality of the broadcasts increase.

I actually have followers of my photography twitter account thank me all the time for my tweets – because they help them improve their photography. If the tweets were rubbish it’d fail to be useful to people and they’d stop following.

3. When you focus upon a topic/niche – ‘niche’ might not be the right word here but in each of the broadcast examples that I’ve given there is a definite ‘focus’ of what the broadcasted tweets will be about. Barack Obamas tweets are about him and what he and his campaign team are doing, CNN’s account is used for breaking news stories, MacRumors uses theirs to talk about Apple news and my photogrpahy tweets are all obviously about photography.

I guess this taps into points #1 and #2 – users sign up because they have an interest in a specific topic and as long as the tweets are on topic and useful – they don’t mind the lack of interactivity.

4. When you mix it up – of the 7 top users of Twitter that don’t use Twitter purely as a broadcasting tool it is interesting to note that most of them DO use Twitter to ‘broadcast’ from time to time. They tweet their own links, point people to their own projects etc on a semi-regular basis – but it’s not overwhelming.

I find on my @problogger Twitter account that I get very positive feedback from people when links to my own posts go up on the account. What I find though is that my followers are much more open to seeing my links if I’m also posting other interesting links and mixing up my tweets with other interactions (replies to others, tweets about my day, reflections on topics that I’m interested in etc). The more variety I inject into my tweets the more positive feedback I get and the more people seem to click on my own broadcast style tweets.

What Do You Think?

Please don’t get me wrong – I love Twitter most when it is used conversationally, when people truly connect and where it’s used relationally. However I’m not sure it always needs to be used in this way and actually love to see people using it in a variety of ways also.

I’m interested to hear how you use Twitter. Do you ‘broadcast’, ‘converse’ do both or perhaps use Twitter in a completely different way?

I’d also love to see examples of some of the most effective uses of Twitter that you’ve seen.

I’m looking forward to your comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



When is Broadcasting OK on Twitter?