Don’t Feed Everything You Can Think Of Into Your Twitter Feed
Don’t Feed Everything You Can Think Of Into Your Twitter Feed
I have to admit that I learnt this lesson the hard way. There are a number of services which allow you to automate tweets being fed into your Twitter stream. These services, such as location based games like Foursquare, generate automatic tweets which are shared with Twitter when you perform tasks in their application. The feedback I got from my Twitter followers following a couple of weeks of regular mechanical tweets advising people that I had “checked in” at locations around Liverpool was that they were not interested in what the application had to say, they were more interested in what I had to say. I stopped Foursquare being able to post things to Twitter and Facebook, instead limiting my updates specifically to people who have opted-in to following me on Foursquare. They now receive regular updates about which part of Liverpool I am in and vice versa. This, again, echoes the fact that different social media platforms are for different functions: my Twitter followers didn’t want to know about my location, in the same way that my Facebook followers don’t want to know about the type of things I post on Twitter.
This doesn’t mean that you should be afraid of automating the way that you tweet, you just need to be careful about how you go about it. One of the ways I have been able to reach 2000 tweets without my fingers falling off is because of a script I can run within my RSS reader, NetNewsWire, which writes “Reading:” at the beginning of the tweet, automatically clips the headline of the piece I am reading, generates a bit.ly link for the URL and puts it at the end and then lets me review and edit it before posting it to Twitter with one click. The reason that “reading” is the largest word in the cloud at the top of this post is because the most frequent type of tweet I have posted has been a reference to something I am reading in my RSS reader. As these links are based on articles in the blogs and news sites I follow they are generally highly relevant to the theatre and new media sectors, both topics I hope my followers are interested in. I have had no complaints about this format of tweet and see sharing relevant links to those who follow me as one of my primary uses of Twitter. I can use the bit.ly links to judge the relevance of the link I have posted by the number of clicks it gets, and am always very pleased when my links are retweeted by people around the world.
Photo credit: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Flickr
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