The reason Twitter is successful is because it gives the reader control, unlike e-mail where the spammer takes over your Inbox. So what I am saying is that when you are a Twitter Reader you need to excercise that control to prevent Twitter sucking up your time.

The advice is different when you are a writer because you are no longer in control, you can’t force people to follow you, you can’t force followers to actually read what you are broadcasting. You are on the other side of the issue and need to use time to make your broadcasts as attractive as possible. There are other things you can do too – but my article was about time!

I will surely take that into consideration from now on when I tweet or re-tweet!

Thanks for this great information.

However one thing I’d like to say is that I wouldn’t necessarily try to make EVERY tweet “valuable and worthwhile” that won’t waste your audience’s time. I say that because my standards for a good tweet will be different from other people. Something I find valuable might not be valuable to other people, so I think I will just be myself and tweet what I (and maybe others) will find interesting

Personally I think this highlights a common problem – people treat twitter like an RSS feed, email or in some cases they want it to replace their own website! If you need to read every tweet to keep in the loop then you are probably following the wrong people and you are also setting yourself a very difficult (impossible?) challenge.

A case in point is big organisations who think twitter is the appropriate place to post updates on services. For example my train company posts up news on service delays. So are they expecting me to follow every tweet just in case one of them might actually be about my route? Or, I could just go to their website and look at the relevant page should I be interested in an update. Now there’s a crazy thought!

I think people are jumping on the twitter bandwagon without quite appreciating the transient nature of messages. If tweeting at the right time helps more people to see my message then that’s great – but I think I’d prefer to have people opted in to my mail out or subscribed to my RSS feed. Then I know that there is a message sitting there waiting for the next time they look, with twitter the message is lost quickly, very quickly in the case of some people!