6 Responses to “ What’s the point of Twitter?”

1. Shani Lee , on June 25th, 2009 at 11:41 Said:

   Hi Trevor,
   Nice summary and lots of useful tips. I just want to pick up on one or two of the other points made at the seminar -
   i) Twitter as online oracle … twitter is a really great way of getting informed information quickly. there's lots of examples of teachers using it, both for their own research and when working directly with their classes, this is a dimension that businesses have been much slower to develop. I'm just inthe process of buying some new kit for one of our projects and, as usual, I'm overwhelmed by the choice and not sure of all the implications of this feature over that. I'll be asking fellow twitterers for their help, and I'll get an answer that's useful to me in a very short time. I don't think the advantages of this in terms of cost reductions and value for money can be underestimated.
   2) to continue that theme a little – twitter is great for conversations that lead to innovations and connecting people that help progress those innovations. yesterday I had two spontaneous conversations, one which will lead to a new project, and the other where we found out about an innovation that will help with some research we are doing.
   Of course, this don't come easy – I've been using twitter for some long time now, and twitter relationships are enhanced with face to face networking as well. Panel members at the NLab Social Networking Conference last year suggested that businesses set a budget for their social media activities eg twenty minutes a day to help balance the time cost and the capital gain (whether that's social, network, intellectual or economic).

2. Ian Moore , on July 2nd, 2009 at 08:26 Said:

   Hi Trevor,

   Lots of useful tips in there to help people get up and running on Twitter.

   Couple of bits to add…

   I've found MrTweet (http://mrtweet.com/ @MrTweet) very useful to help build up a group of people to follow based on my interactions with a small group initially.

   On automatically feeding blog posts to Twitter, I'm mostly against this apart from when time cannot be justified or upon startup. It goes against what makes Social Media of value, the personal side. I've removed TwitterFeed from the RKH Twitter account (@rkhleicester) as I'm sure those listening would rather hear a human get excited by our news, instead of being spammed with a story headline. Point is there's a lot of great tools out there that look fantastic but if overused defeat the point and perhaps turn out to work in a negative way (i.e. people stop listening).

   CoTweet looks fantastic so far, in a business setting. Whilst I'm having to use other apps/sites alongside it, the ability to have multiple users contributing to a single account and the ability to track conversations is great. On an active account it'd be crazy for multiple people to be logged into a single account from variety of sources.

   Finally, not enough is made of the actual benefit of Twitter at these events. I think Twitter's current users being mostly tech saavy often forget to list benefits and stick to features/functionality. Getting people to use Twitter is easy enough but then the majority drop off seeing no point putting out messages and getting no replies/correspondance.

   It's the point at which you begin talking to other people about areas of mutual interest and can pass on advice/help and receive it in return that its true value is seen.

   - Ian (@idmoore)

3. Trevor Wood , on July 2nd, 2009 at 09:05 Said:

   Thanks Shani and Ian for your comments – yes there are lots of other tools out there, this was never intended to be a comprehensive list.

   I did forget to mention Nikki Pilkington's Tweetmentor course (http://www.nikkipilkington.com) which is a very good introduction on how to use Twitter

4. Trevor Wood , on July 2nd, 2009 at 14:42 Said:

   Following on from Ian's comment about TwitterFeed

   I understand where you're coming from with that, but I have to disagree. Why re-invent the wheel? If you're going to tweet about your blog, why not let an automated system do it for you? Yes, it is a little less personal, but I think most people would accept it, unless it's abused by tweeting blog posts several times a day, and if you're writing several blog items a day and tweeting them manually, isn't that as bad?

5. Ian Moore , on July 3rd, 2009 at 13:46 Said:

   Follow up to your thoughts Trevor. I can see exactly where you're coming from.

   It's just I feel in our case that a person able to carry on the conversation on Twitter is better to put out the news than it being automatically done from a feed. We're not going to be putting out huge volumes of information (1 every couple of days from site for now I guess) and I'd like to show that the several contributors to Twitter are active/excited by there area and know what they're talking about.

   Another way I could perhaps look at it is that headlines on our news articles need more consideration if we're going to use them in Tweets. But I think for the amount of effort needed to rewrite an article into a Tweet, that more can be made out of the 140 chars and personality can begin to show through.

   However, this is just how I feel as we start out with an agency feed and also only a small part of what we're hoping to use Twitter for. I fully expect the style of Tweets and use of Twitter to change as we learn from experience and talk to people who we engage with online via blogs/Twitter etc.

   Have a great weekend.

   - Ian

6. Nikki Pilkington , on July 15th, 2009 at 08:21 Said:

   A great roundup and nice to have all the links in one place (thanks for the Tweetmentor mention!)

   I think it's impossible to cover all that twitter is capable fof in a short seminar, so by covering the main points he did well

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