I’ve been using Twitter for about nine months, and I probably send out about five tweets a day. Twitter is an interesting animal, in that different people use it in different ways. I think that it was originally meant to be a list of your current doings (“eating breakfast”, “feeding baby”, “out to lunch”), but reading grocery lists like that is like watching grass grow. And I prefer to watch paint drying. Twitter has evolved, though, to be many things to many people.
Personally, I tend to use it as a stream of thought collector. I think of it as supplemental content for my web site, so I don’t reply to others much on it (unless the reply might be interesting to read on the site). I do keep up with a lot of people, however, I just do it via direct message. These do not show up on the public record, but the other person receives them via email or through third-party interfaces like “Twhirl“. I also try to include any links or contextual information from the original tweet in my responses. This ensures that each of my tweets is a stand-alone thought.
I’ve seen some news organizations (including my local paper, “The Northwest Indiana Times“) just post links back to their content. They’re not there to be social, as the term “social media” might imply, but rather to disseminate their products to anyone on Twitter who may be interested. Just don’t expect them to follow you back, since these are often automated bots. The more successful ones have a live person behind them that does follow and engage other users.
Other people may use Twitter as a chat room, sending a series of fragmented replies to several conversations at once. The problem with this is that Twitter has no threaded discussions. That’s not a criticism of the way Twitter works, it’s just a fact. When I read someone’s archive of tweets, I like to be able to understand each one and get a feel for what that person is about. There is no right way or wrong way to use Twitter, but I still have an opinion on what makes the most sense. I usually only “follow” people who use the same tweet etiquette I do.
There’s nothing worse than a tweet that reads, “OMG! ME TOO!” What does that even mean? I guess I could go back into the timeline of whoever they were responding to, but if their tweets are just as indecipherable, then it would do little good. How about something like, “You thought that last night’s Doctor Who episode was great? I loved it too! Here’s a link to my thoughts on it: http://is.gd/zIy“. That is easily within Twitter’s 140 character limit, tells everyone what you’re talking about, and provides a link to more information than your short tweet can convey.
The nice thing about Twitter is that the architecture is so open that all of these uses are possible. Businesses send out links to products via the web interface. Spammers send out spam through the Twitter API. Podcasters send out notices of the latest releases with Twhirl. People talk about their day by cell phone text message. Short messages, long messages, and bot messages. It’s all good with Twitter, in whichever way people want to do it. It’s a very flexible, if sometimes unreliable, system.
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