How to Handle the Twitter
5.06.2009 | Website Reviews
Imagine if you had Superman’s ability to hear everything that goes on on planet Earth. No, not just the headlines that gets printed on today’s newspaper nor the more frequently updated news and blog websites – but actual chatter, from everyone; about every important and mundane thing in real time. Pretty awesome huh?
One would think with these new-found powers, we’d be SUPER! But the truth is, we don’t have Superman’s ability to fly, to travel at the speed of light or his ability to multitask. As much as we’d like to be kept up with on-demand gossip, we can’t tackle the entire beast. Even Superman needs sleep sometimes.
So how should someone or some company handle Twitter? How can we use it to our advantage?
Twitter for some time has been a more evolved and efficient way of communicating for tech geeks. After all, the world is getting smaller and it is getting harder to keep a full schedule of work, play, family and to maintain relationships with friends that are around the world.
At the base of this craze lies a communications tool. For the life of me, I still can not figure out why most people don’t get that. In the world of newspapers, magazines and blogs, you subscribe to them cause you find them interesting. Including them in your life made you better in one way or another. The same is true for Twitter – you follow interesting people or friends because you want to engage them and you have interest in what they have to say.
For the people who are touting their ability to garner 5,000 or 10,000 followers in 30 days… why? Your one time achievement doesn’t make you a social media expert and working that hard to clutter up your life with meaningless chatter is just a pathetic cry for attention in an otherwise apathetic Twitter world where everyone has their own agendas. #FAIL tag all around.
Seeing companies trying to make Twitter work for them has also been interesting in the last few months as various companies try out different techniques to tackle the collective. While some companies get it and engage customers at their time of need, others are again, too involved in the race for numbers without a good reason for building that base.
If you sell vacuum cleaners and you have a website. Shouldn’t your purpose be helping those who have an immediate vacuuming needs to learn more about your products vs. trying to get anyone and everyone to make your website their browsers’ homepage? For the companies who are building a large following on Twitter w/o a real clear motive, that’s exactly what their doing – climbing the wrong ladder.
So how should you or companies use Twitter to enhance your lives?
1. Recognize it’s a communications tool. Similar to the phone, text messaging, emails, etc. People use it to vent, to inform/broadcast and to get help from the platform. If your contributions can fulfill those needs, by all means lend a hand and jump in the conversation.
2. Recognize that tweets are from real people with evolving lives. People need different things for a short period of time in their daily lives. If you can help by sending a short tweet, great! But if your goal is to help, there’s no need to expect a BFF status after the short exchange.
3. Use Twitter as your personal resource, not as a popularity contest. When you ask for help, it’s much more useful to ask your friends rather than to shout your question in the middle of Times Square where no one hears you. The same is true for Twitter. The platform is MUCH more useful when you garner people of similar interests.
4. Utilize the tools. Twitter.com sucks! However, their open API has allowed an insane amount of useful tools to be created around the platform. Just like you wouldn’t be caught dead using a rotary phone, check out some of the available Twitter apps that are more suited to your mobile or working life.
5. For companies, research the chatter on the platform about you and then define a Twitter strategy to match. You can’t jump into other peoples’ conversations and then tell them what to talk about. If you listen though… there could be more gold there than any of the old school product registration cards.
6. Finally, take a break once in awhile. You’re not God or Superman or Skynet. Monitoring chatter can be fun but it really does help your productivity to turn it all off once in awhile.
Related posts: