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Written by Larry Dearing
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Thursday, 08 July 2010 08:35 |
I struggle with both the potentials of and the problems with Twitter. Odds are high I’m not alone in this one. I spend a lot of time and energy trying to keep up with everything while trying to find or develop realistic metrics for its effectiveness. While I do firmly believe Twitter to be valuable tool in developing relationships and staying in touch with your audience, I’m starting to rethink some of the “expert” advice we’ve all heard, along with exactly how I should be using it.
The experts say you must have a strategy. I agree completely with this. It’s the strategy here I’m rethinking, not the usefulness of the tool, but to do that I have to be willing to throw some Twitter basics into question. After both observing and participating some things just don’t make sense and need a re-evaluation. Perhaps you find yourself in the same situation.
To start the process I want to look at is who’s following me, and more importantly why. I get people who follow me that are following hundreds if not thousands of others as well. How can they possibly be following me and care about my message, assuming they even see it. The conclusion is they’re not. I know some of my followers seem to be genuinely looking for my type of content and sometimes interacting with me. Though much fewer in number, they’re actually following and listening. I think these are the only followers I should really worry about and should work on developing more of.
Once I've looked at who’s following me and why, I want to rethink who I’m following and why. We read from many of our “trusted sources” that a good close balance in the number of followers and following is best. Too few followers and people think you have nothing of value to offer while if you have a disproportional amount of followers, we’ve been told people won’t follow you because they’ll think you won’t follow them back. We learn that we should do reciprocal follows for almost everyone or they may stop following us. Do I really care about the masses, or just about my real audience?
I’ve been trying to follow the guidelines above but I’ve found it pretty much impossible to really follow all the people and try and glean out valuable content. While using filters and lists do help, there’s just too much stuff! Many of my follows are merely “courtesy” reciprocal follows that I’m not getting anything of value from. This seems very ineffective. My conclusion here is that I’m following too many for the wrong reasons and I need to rethink a strategy so that I can get the best value from those I really want to follow and eliminate the noise.
So who is it I really want to follow and why? When I started following people on Twitter it was because I found their articles, blogs, comments and other posts interesting and informative. I also was genuinely interested in getting to know customers and fiends. I found their content both interesting and useful. I learned and benefited more from this earlier strategy. Does this sounds like it’s about me? We’ll, who I follow and where I find value should be about me. The type of content I provide to my real followers is what should be all about them.
Lastly, I also want to rethink what I’m providing to my real followers. Is it useful, or am I just contributing to the noise while trying to follow some quota of presubscribed volume of tweets? I like to follow people that provide me with value. Likewise, I need to concentrate more on what my real message is and what my real followers may find helpful and informative. My conclusion here is to stop worrying about trying to find a lot of stuff of general broad interest to most of my “casual followers”. If I tweet a bit less, I think it’s better than diluting my message. I want someone to actually read something if they see it came from me rather than just skimming over it…again.
In starting to reformulate my Twitter strategy and looking at how some of the basic concepts fail when put to the practicality test, I may have made some discoveries. First, I don’t think I’ll worry about offending people by not doing reciprocal follows. If they value my content, they will follow me anyway simply because they’re interested and are really listening. I’m no longer going to worry about balance and proportion of numbers. I’ll let the chips fall where they may based on either reciprocal or unilateral interest. Finally, I think I need to focus more on the quality, value, and relevance of my tweets for my real followers. This must be a more effective strategy than the “do it all” approach and will provide a better result for both my real followers and for myself. Sometimes hard metrics aren’t applicable, it just feels right.
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