I've been quite obsessed with twitter lately. More accurately, I've been obsessed with the incredible potential that twitter offers. This is definitely skewed towards a marketing perspective because, well, I'm studying marketing at business school with a focus towards the high tech industry. So, I'm a geek that wants to sell you things. That being said, I am excited about what Twitter for more than just marketing purposes. I'll briefly touch on two things that have been on my mind in the past few days about the twitterverse.
1. How many people should I follow? (The pull)
As I am fairly new to twitter, only about a month or two in, I have been trying to navigate my way through noise in order to figure out the best way to use it both for pushing and pulling content. I prefer to use it to follow thought leaders of industry, people like Tim O'Reilly & Kevin Rose, or up and coming companies like hulu & boxee. It's been a great way to stay on top of issues that are near and dear to my heart. However there are also a few hundred of my "nearest and dearest" b-school buddies who are also getting into twitter. Many of them tend to use it as a glorified IM platform, which understandably, is a perfectly valid use of twitter. I just can't stand opening up my feed and seeing a 100 @replies of a conversation. I have taken a hard stance on how many people I'll follow for this reason. Perhaps I piss off some who I don't follow back, but I don't feel it's a required practice. I had an interesting discussion with @mattweg about the ratio of following/followers and how it is an interesting metric that may or may not be related to how many followers one receives via services like Mr. Tweet for example. I'd love to here thoughts from anyone in the know. Tweet me: @kones
2.How often should I post? (The push)
The other issue is how often should one post. I had this discussion with @jfalk, who's been using twitter considerably longer than I have. He tries to keep his tweets to one or two a week, only posting niche specific content. While I am still figuring out how I want to use twitter, I tend to tweet as I feel like it, when I find interesting web content, or (less often) when I have something poignant to say in 140 characters or less. I log on using thwirl on my laptop or twitterfon on my iphone and immediately respond to any @replies I've received, but then want to post a link or comment and feel like it can be overkill. I've often refrained from tweeting something interesting because I don't want to overdo it. There's one person who I no longer follow who had great updates, but they happened 6 times an hour. It was just clogging up my stream.
These are just some random thoughts, twitter has reinvigorated the need for me to start blogging again, and 140 characters can be somewhat restrictive. I don't want people to bookmark this page, b/c I'll link to any post through twitter, and prefer to just have the followers there instead. This page may move, it's acting as just overflow for the time being. I hope you enjoy my ranting and raving.
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Interesting post, Adam! The issue of how often to tweet will definitely become even more hotly debated as more people enter the "Twittersphere."
ReplyDeleteAs someone who currently follows a relatively large number of people I don't typically notice when someone is overtweeting. Because I'm following so many people, those tweets get mixed in pretty well.
But for people following a lower number I can see where someone tweeting even 10x per day would seem annoying. For people who are just starting out on Twitter or have chosen to only follow a small number, the velocity of the people they follow is an issue that will affect their enjoyment of the medium. The content of a power tweeter may be great, but the velocity could be overwhelming.
What number of tweets is overtweeting? It lies in the eye of the beholder. Ultimately, the more people you follow, the less of an issue it becomes.