A couple weeks ago I sat on a panel at 140tc that was moderated by Guy Kawasaki about brand building on Twitter. There was a lot of great insight by all the panelists, and I had a great time in the conversation. However, there were a couple of disagreements that I wanted to elaborate on.
The last two weeks have been filled with a lot of traveling. I also don’t get cable at home, so I generally have cable TV on in the background in hotel rooms. I get my fill, and it’s decent background noise. When I go home, I don’t miss it. Some were making the point that cable news is a good place to emulate for how to tweet. Repeat the same message many times over the day to make sure you get it across. There are many great tools available to get this done, so technically, it’s no problem.
However, I have a problem with this. To me, it feels like it’s fighting noise with noise. Eventually everyone is going to go twitter-deaf (twideaf?) and unfollow you from the amount of redundant tweets. I personally try to keep my number of followers kind of low on Twitter. It makes it easier to actually get to know people, which is what I’m interested in. I’m sure that if I followed more people, I would have built up a bigger following base. Which is great, but that is tertiary to what my actual goal on twitter is; have great conversations with great people and learn something every now and then. This use case on Twitter is not conducive to brands that counter noise with more noise. I’m far more interested in real conversations with real people, quality always trumps quantity.
The conversation on the panel was top notch, and I’m thankful I was asked to participate.
Anyway, here’s the panel, in it’s entirety:
Growing Your Brand on Twitter: Strategies and Tactics From the Trenches from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.
3 Comments
I agree Brad. People that repeatedly tweet the same thing throughout the day are downright annoying. It makes me want to stop following them. Anybody that thinks otherwise does not understand Twitter and are using it for the wrong reason.
Tweeting something multiple times a day is SPAM. If a follower doesn’t read it (or find it) the first time they didn’t care about it to begin with.
First, 140tc needs more camera angles.
Second, I think both arguments have value. Should you be tweeting the same thing over and over? Absolutely not, but why not attempt to continue the topic at hand throughout different times of the day to stay on top of your follower’s pages? On my personal page, I rarely dive any deeper than my homepage to read tweets.
Basically, I’m agreeing with you, but I feel that those who strictly want attention, good or bleh, are going to tweet as much as humanly possible. West Seattle Blog is kind of ticking me off with this right now.
I don’t have the time or desire to watch the entire hour+ presentation now (thanks for participating and enduring it for us, Brad!) but would concur that fighting noise with noise is not helpful for many of us. Over the past six months, I’ve unfollowed thousands of folks largely due to noise and repetition. A good many of those were “experts” (like Guy K) that I thought I needed to follow. Yet I quickly learned that expert=flagrant self-promo. It’s great that someone thinks you have something wonderful to say, but there’s no point in RTing the praise. People will determine on their own if you are useful. If you constantly have to pat yourself on the back, you probably have some larger psychological issues. But, that’s a topic for another day. Likewise, seeing the same info (even if it is useful) repeatedly is not why I’m using Twitter.
Sadly, there is some truth to the concept. Twitter folks don’t listen the same way that they did a year ago. I joked to a friend last week that I could tweet about being set on fire and might get a handful of responses (or none!) depending on the time of day and what else was happening. And this is with nearly 3,500 followers. Yet this time last year, when I had fewer than 300 followers, I would’ve gotten an instant and very concerned response from many more folks. Now, there are many more folks using Twitter, but only the newbies are likely to be listening well (until they burnout). People take long breaks away and don’t catch back up. I often find that close friends miss things because they’re actually living their lives.
What’s the solution? Well, I don’t think the tweetaholics have it. Part of it has happened naturally for many of us; we’re simply more conscious about tweeting. People have largely evolved beyond the “stuck in traffic” or “annoyingly waiting at the dentist’s office” tweets to ones that are more significant. Now if some expert would just start suggesting the mantra “think before you tweet,” we might find things to be more civilized and relevant. Maybe?