Andrew Girvan

10 Things I Have Learnt From My First 2000 Tweets

Based on numbers from those following me and those I follow, I know as I hit my 2,000th tweet that I am by no way the world’s most prolific Twitter user. According to one of the many services set up to help you remember such things, I first joined Twitter on 19 January 2008. My first tweet, at this point being fed by my Facebook status updates, espousing my anticipation of Tim Burton’s Sweeny Todd, also included a link back to my Facebook profile. On reflection Sweeny Todd isn’t that great but I have since realised that I actually have bigger issues with Tim Burton and his insistence on casting Helena Bonham Carter in absolutely everything. This, I realise, is a matter for another time.

The matter at hand is that I have been an active Twitter user for some 2 and a bit years. In that time I have learnt a number of things about the micro-blogging platform which I think are worth passing on. I shall seek to do that below, hopefully keeping to the 10 points I have allowed myself. At the top of the post is a word cloud created from the 2000 tweets. I think the words which pop up most often, mainly “reading”, “theatre” and the selection of URL shorteners I have used, reflect that I have been using the tips I present below for the duration of my Twitter participation. I was both relieved and pleased that “theatre” was one of the most prominent words in the cloud. It would have been a bit embarrassing if it hadn’t been there.

1. Twitter is only as useful as the people you follow

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this in at least two other posts on this blog but there is no harm in saying it again. Twitter is truly only as useful as the people that you follow. If you have a private feed and only follow two of your mates who also have a private feed then its pretty much a MSN messenger replacement tool. If you follow people in your area of work / interest / passion then it suddenly becomes a source of interesting links, pictures, stories, articles, blog posts and conversations, most likely about things that you are interested in too. If you start following newspapers or news website feeds then Twitter effectively becomes an RSS reader, feeding you information from around the world as it happens. By choosing who you follow, you craft your Twitter stream into something unique to you.

Chances are no one else in the world has exactly the same Twitter experience as you do. I have a Twitter experience full of theatre and new media links with local and national news stories from places I am interested in all over the world. By following as many people as I do – I think the number is around the 1,800 mark at this point, it might need a cull soon – it has become a constant stream of information which I feel I can dip in and out of, completely different to the way I treat my RSS reader as I know I will never be able to read everything which passes. I do, however know that if there is something important going on at the time that I am looking at Twitter I will probably find out about it. Michael Jackson’s death was the first piece of news I found out about primarily through Twitter, I have the people I follow to thank / blame for that!

2. Twitter isn’t Facebook

They are two completely different platforms and, in my opinion, should be used for two completely different things. Because Facebook has the dual opt-in feature of you requesting someone’s friendship and them having to grant it, the way I choose to use Facebook is very much as a way of keeping in contact with friends, family and acquaintances. If I am someone’s friend on Facebook then there is a good chance that I have met them at least once. I tend not to add random people to Facebook. In this way the things that I want to see on Facebook and the information I want get out of it are very different to that of Twitter. On Facebook I want to see photos of parties I haven’t managed to get to, places people have been and I want to hear about how they are feeling or what they are doing in a personal sense.

On Twitter the experience is completely different. Twitter allows people to follow you without you having to give them approval, assuming that you do not have a protected feed. The less personal aspect of this relationship means that people are less likely to post the depth of information they post to their personal Facebook accounts. As a result Twitter has evolved into a platform for things like sharing links to interesting stories from elsewhere on the web. It can be used to promote personal projects and work but is just as likely used to share the work of others simply because it is felt to be useful or informative to the community at large.

So there are my opinions on why I feel Twitter and Facebook are two very different things. Going back to my initial point, no one’s Twitter experience is going to be the same. I am simply commenting on broader trends I have observed. Going back to the idea of both services being different, I think there is an argument against linking both services together. Even in the corporate setting, somewhere where I feel the crime I am about to pass judgement goes on far more than on the personal side, I think the messages and level of conversation you are able to engage your audience can and maybe should be very different across the two platforms.

A number of the Twitter profiles I follow, mainly in the small theatre company / business sector, have engaged a social media strategy where their Facebook feeds their Twitter feed. I am aware that in my early days on Twitter this was exactly what I was doing, but on reflection it was not the greatest way to get the best out of Twitter. Tools such as Ping.fm allow you to post the same update across multiple social networks. If you have a simplified broadcast strategy this can be quite effective. What I would discourage is posting from your Facebook feed so that it leaves a link in the tweet back to your Facebook status updates. This has really started annoying me recently, particularly where I think I am going to get a link to further content. Clicking on a link in my Twitter feed only to see exactly the same words but on a Facebook profile does not add any value to the conversation. Cross post if such a broadcast strategy is what your organisation is trying to achieve,  but avoid duplication, and maybe spend some time working on how your followers on different social networks differ and how you can be better engaging them where they choose to interact with you.

3. Its far more fun if you’re human

Its always nice if someone tweets as a person instead of as a corporate identity. There are times where this may not be the most workable way forwards of course. If you have established a Twitter feed which just duplicates your RSS feed and passes on links to stories on your blog / corporate site then there is justification for just making the biography of your Twitter profile as descriptive as possible about exactly what you are going to get. Examples of such accounts would be the Guardian’s stage news twitter feed @GuardianStage which simply duplicates the RSS feed you could otherwise subscribe to. Here there is no engagement with the subscribed audience, just a feed of useful news.

On the other hand if you are the person responsible for updating the corporate Twitter feed there is no reason you can’t tell us in the biography who you actually are! There might well be more than one person responsible for it but there are tools out there for you to use and many do so effectively. Remember the way to use social media most effectively is to engage your audience in conversation. I’m sure you’ll agree its far easier to have a conversation when you know who you are talking to. This might be as simple as sticking something like “Tweets from Marketing Assistant, Bob” in the biography field. Of course, if you are the standbys for Elphaba and Glinda in the West End production of Wicked you could always sign off your tweets with your initials so that your audience know who it is they are talking to. I think this is a really nice touch. There is reference made to the fact that the actresses have a laptop in their dressing room in this interview. If the marketing department of one of the West End’s biggest shows is willing to empower their employees to tweet on their behalf, showing their human side, couldn’t your organisation?

4. Very few people are being innovative on Twitter but it does happen

I’ve outlined the two real ways I’ve seen people use their Twitter accounts in the tips above. Basically people seem to either be using their Twitter feeds as a fog horn, really just another broadcast mechanism to get their corporate message out there. There are people who are using Twitter to engage people in conversation, not focusing on their own message as much as they are focusing on the wider industry they are involved in and the seeking engagement from the people who follow them through the use of hashtags and the like. There are, of course, people who use it for a bit of a mixture of both, sharing links to stories posted to other sites as well as their own and engaging people casually, replying to messages. The fact of the matter is though, I rarely see anyone do anything earth-shattering innovative on Twitter.

There have been examples of people performing poems, writing novels 140 characters at a time, delivering nothing but interesting quotes or facts and live tweeting however I think there are really only two organisations who deserve honourable mentions for their efforts on Twitter in the theatrical sector. The first would probably have to be TwitPanto which took the wonders (possibly) of the traditional British pantomime from the stages of regional theatres across the land, straight on to Twitter’s theatrical boards with a massive, multi character, scripted performance just before Christmas. The project has run for the past two years and is the brain child of @Bounder with the commendable support of Birmingham Hippodrome who cunningly used it to remind people they had thousands of seats to fill for its own, real world, pantomime.

The second honourable mention goes to the very hard working Twitterers at @WestEndUpdates. The Twitter presence of theatre break supplier Show And Stay have augmented their enviable blog, with contributions from Guardian theatre writer Carrie Dunn, with a strong Twitter presence which could be seen as a case study in how to do engaging theatre tweets right. As well as live tweeting events such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 3-hour-a-week-reality-casting-come-adverts for his latest revivals they also hold a Twitter quiz week-daily at 2.10pm. Using something as simple as a online theatrical pub quiz its amazing how many of the people I follow on Twitter suddenly start rushing to reply to questions about upcoming productions, song lyrics or general musical theatre knowledge. “Prizes” for the lucky winners of the quiz rounds tend to be links to relevant YouTube videos, again, spot-on new media engagement. 10 out of 10 for completely engaging your target audience with something that they are passionate about @WestEndUpdates.

5. If you have the words “producer”, “theatre” or “actor” in your bio I will follow you back

This one pretty much speaks for itself but it basically links back to my first point, Twitter is only as useful as the people you follow. I am lucky enough to get quite a few followers, mainly I think because of a blog post I wrote a while ago originally titled 100 Theatre People To Follow On Twitter. The post still generates the majority of the traffic to this blog some days, mainly because if you type the words “twitter” and “theatre” into Google at the same time my blog is one of the first to come up. So I have a lot of people who follow me who are obviously interested in finding more Twitter people to follow. When the email comes through from Twitter telling me that I have someone new following me the first thing I do is pop open their Twitter page and have a quick look over their biography. Its pretty easy to spot when someone is a spammer on Twitter, and I’ll go on to talk about them a bit later in the post. My basic rule, however is that if you have “producer”, “theatre” or “actor” in your biography, chances are I’ll be interested in what you are saying and I’ll take the chance and follow you back. That leads us nicely onto the next tip:

6. Some people still don’t get the basic stuff

Once you have signed up to Twitter chances are the first thing you are going to do is going and find people to follow. Once you have gone through the Suggested User List the next port of call may well be to search on Twitter search or Google for Twitter users that are interested in the same things that you are and then start following them. If you want be engaged in their conversation, which chances are you do – some celebrities and the like may choose never to follow back – and you think you are going to be contributing things with the same validity and importance as those you follow, and there is no reason why you will not, you are probably looking for them to follow you back.

Make it a little bit easier for the people you follow to differentiate you from any other spammer that might choose to follow them. Make sure when you are setting up your Twitter account that you filling in the information it asks you for. If you look on the right hand side of Twitter profiles you will see everyone has the same chances to introduce themselves as everyone else: Name, Location, Web and Bio. In addition make sure you have even a jokey snap uploaded into the picture field, spammers don’t normally bother with pictures so a blank Twitter logo is one of the basic ways of working out whether you are a real person or just someone using the innovative method of Twitter to flog me viagra!

Put even jokey information into the boxes when you are setting up your Twitter profile and you should find that the rate with which people follow you back rockets. Remember that the Web field is a perfect place to point people to your project or corporate homepage, its one of the few places where people will expect to have a clear cut corporate message. You could well be in a position where, if people know they want to find your homepage, they know all they will have to do is follow the link from your Twitter profile. This might be particularly true if you have a clearer, memorable or more concise Twitter handle than you do a domain name.

7. It’s nice to know whose looking at what you’re looking at

So you’ve got yourself set up with a Twitter account, people are following you back left, right and centre and you are engaging other Twitter users across the globe both about their projects and those that you are pursuing yourself. How do you work out whether anyone is actually interested in what you are putting into your Twitter stream? There is no straight forward way of getting metrics out of Twitter about how many people have visited your Twitter profile, or how many hits your profile is receiving. Your follower count, which keeps a record of how many people have opted in to listen to what you have to say, might give you part of the analytical data you are looking for.

The other way to go about generating metrics from Twitter is to look carefully at what kind of links you are posting through Twitter. We all know that Twitter only allows you to post links 140 characters long, to get round posting long hyperlinks to external content there has been a massive rise in the number of URL shorteners which allow you to put long links in and get small links out. URL shorteners work by giving users opportunities to use very short top level domains with short URLs, some are as short as http://is.gd, and they then generate random codes, linking the strings back to the original address that you supplied the service. If you use a URL shortener such as Bit.ly or Ow.ly you can actually get real time statistics about the number of people who have clicked through your links.

In addition to the number of people retweeting content I have posted on Twitter, it has been great to look at the number of clicks different links I have posted have received. Its important to remember that online influence grows not only from the ablity to supply readers with good content, such as your own blog posts, but also through knowing where to direct others, and pointing others towards quality content produced by others. Services such as Bit.ly allow you to know you are achieving success in this area.

8. Never say “SEO” or “WordPress” in a tweet

No online technology has stayed free from the grasp of spammers for long and Twitter is no different. There are a number of ways that people have harnessed the service for their own either slightly or overtly spammy purposes. The example of “never say the word SEO in a tweet” mainly falls into the slightly spammy category. SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a process of getting your website listed higher in Google and other search engines. This can be done in a number of ways and in a crowded market place suppliers are constantly touting for business. Unfortunately their tactics are often very similar to those looking for you to purchase their viagra. Any blogger will tell you that the majority of spam comments or contact form responses they get will be from SEO spammers offering to get their sites to the top results in Google.

When you make the mistake of typing SEO in a tweet, not only will about half a dozen automated bots around the web retweet your message with absolutely no relevance, apart from the fact that you have included the term SEO, you will also spend the next six months getting so called “SEO experts” the world over following you on Twitter. Some times you don’t even need to tweet something to be sucked into the world of Twitter spam. Spammers will sometimes follow you completely at random, along with hundreds of other users, hoping that they generate an audience for their spam messages. If you don’t follow them back then nothing they say will appear in your Twitter feed and your Twitter experience will be in no way effected.

The other side of this type of spam is following someone that you think might be an interesting user, only for spammers in their market segments add you for no reason at all. I have had a huge number of penny stock traders and bloggers follow me recently for no other reason than I started following someone in the sector having heard them on a podcast. As the follower relationships are open for public view on Twitter there is nothing to stop spammers simply looking through who follows that sector leader, take it that I am interested in what he has to say and assume that I might be interested in what they have to spam me with.

9. 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.

10. You’ve reached 2000 tweets, now be careful what you do with them

I have read a blog post which estimates that the average length of an English word is 6 characters. As each Twitter post is limited to 140 characters and I have tweeted 2000 times I may have written as many as 46,666 words in the 2+ years I have been using Twitter. This comes down to an average of 23 words per tweet which might just about be accurate. The short and long of it is that I have written somewhere in the region of 45,000 words. Those words now live in the mythical computerise “cloud” and, according to Twitter’s terms of service although they remain my intellectual property, permanently licensed to Twitter to use as they see fit, they could be deleted at any point in time with no reason having to be given and with no recourse from my end.

On a more practical note, the majority of those tweets included links to articles, photos and the like which I thought were interesting. For this reason alone surely I should make sure that they don’t just disappear one day, giving me no access to them. Twitter regularly has issues with its search functions meaning even if you do an advanced search for a keyword on your own user name there is no guarantee that you will be able to find the link you posted.

There are ways around the Twitter back up issue. The best one I have found recently is Backupify a new, service providing users with up to 2GB of storage for free. The strength of Backupify is not only that you can get free backups of the web based services which you use around the web, but that it will give you either a daily or weekly scheduled backup of those services. Without me having to do anything at all, my tweets, WordPress blogs, facebook profile and more are all backed up automatically, everyday! Critics would say that the system is not flawless, in backing up to Backupify you are simply moving data from one part of the “cloud” to another however Backupify uses Amazon’s S3 service which is certainly the current industry standard for online data storage and doesn’t seem to show and signs of going away any time soon. To get round the issue that both your original data and backup are on remote servers you can download your backups to your own machine and then back them up locally as you would any other important data.

The strength of the Backupify offering really only became clear to me the other day when I downloaded the PDF they provide you of all the tweets on your account. This PDF – which included different sections for your own tweets, replies and direct messages – was what I used to generate the word cloud at the top of the post, and ran to some 270 pages. By copying the PDF into my notes programme, Evernote, I have completely done away with the need to run Twitter search to find my own tweets, I can do it all locally on my own computer by searching the latest PDF of my tweets in Evernote. They’re even available through my Mac’s spotlight seach.

Photo credit: A Wordle.net word cloud of @andrew_girvan‘s first 2000 tweets.