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New followers are mostly spammers. I would estimate a 2:1 ratio.
I'm interested to see how public lists mixes things up.
Ultimately I think this is just the nature of the beasts involved. People who want a bigger number of followers are likely to want follow many other people unless they are hugely competitive. It's all about popularity, not genuine friendship, isn't it??
relationships matters most. We see the evidence that popularity strategies
dont work clearly in the numbers. People with a few hundred followers
(average) are getting similar click through rates to people with tens of
thousands of followers. The size of your tribe doesn't matter nearly as much
as how many of them are listening.
relationships matters most. We see the evidence that popularity strategies
dont work clearly in the numbers. People with a few hundred followers
(average) are getting similar click through rates to people with tens of
thousands of followers. The size of your tribe doesn't matter nearly as much
as how many of them are listening.
Fame happens: "The famous are different from you and me, because they cannot return or even acknowledge the attention they get, and technology cannot change that."
It's really cool that Twitter supports both use cases. It's tragic that many users make the fame use case a goal.
I have begun to consider getting Twitter (Big thanks to Steffan Antonas linking Twitters exponential growth chart vs other social networks for helping me to consider this). Still the word count limit for Tweets is what kept me away in the first place, so I still wonder if it will annoy me, once I "jack into" the Twitter network.
As to the article I was wondering how useful Twitter is for commercial use. When does your content cross the line from being useful to being spam. How do you avoid crossing the grey blurry line even if you keep the number of people who follow you below Dunbar's limit?
As for content crossing the line, I'll quote more eloquent writers:
"Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about." -Cory Doctorow
"We call it advertising when we're not interested in it. When we're interested in it we call it information." -Vint Cerf
Any resources online that are NOT produced by the "Twitter Team" (other then this great article) that can give me a sense of what the limitations of Twitter are and any abilities that I might not have considered as assets in Twitter? The companies own tutorial resources might overstate or understate the functionality that expert users understand far better then the designers themselves.
Thanks again for your reply, it made me realize that the label we give information depends a great deal on weather we want to hear it. This helped me ask a better more useful question. After all, its very easy to unintentionally "force feed" a person content that they might not want at that particular time. A person might get visibly bored in person but on the internet the just skip over your messages without any warning that you just "lost them". Lets hope these list provide feedback when its apparent that peoples interests have changed.
At one point I got caught up in the broad communication potential of Twitter and started to follow more people. I remember hitting 210 people, looking at my stream, and realizing that: 1) this wasn't manageable; 2) I'm not interested in the day-to-day interactions of some of these people; and 3) many people were broadcasting solely promotional content.
So I unfollowed many of them.
This probably won't come as a surprise, but the number I fluctuate around? 150.
Here's to good relationships and the art of listening.
I keep seeing more and more twitter-like usage from friends on Facebook and I wonder - what that means for twitter (considering all of what you have mentioned above).
hope he'll chime in here shortly. On Friday night we were both talking about
how we were using Facebook a lot more these days. In the end, we all crave
intimacy, don't we? That's what I get from Facebook. Every single person I'm
connected to there I know well so the status updates are meaningful to me
and I don't feel so much of that Twitter burnout (velocity in FB is lower
and there's virutally no self promotion, no marketing etc) - I think the
additions of the twitter-like tagging is actually a great move on Facebook's
part - they've taken the best thing about Twitter and implemented it in a
place where the conversation was already well structured. With the addition
of FriendFeed to their ranks...they could easily dominate.
How much do you and the Adaptive Crew use Facebook compared to twitter? Any
strong opinions in the office on the Twitter lists etc?
I'm up to 600 followers/following. About 75-100 of those are news and information only (Wall Street Journal, "experts" who are worth their Tweets [you being one], etc.) . I have been thinking that 600 is too many. I do want to continue to build relationships and listen to what people are "saying," which to me is/was the value of Twitter. I cannot follow 600 and do it well.
I have observed that the more people I follow, the fewer seem to click through to my blog or website, in absolute numbers as well as percentages. Since I do want to raise awareness of my product, and provide additional value on the blog, the usefulness to me of those Tweets is declining. I think people are getting jaded as Twitter has been taken over by marketing.
It will be interesting to see whether the lists make a difference and whether Facebook begins to suffer from Twitteritis as it works to compete.
I've been playing with Twitter lists for a few hours and I've noticed that the lists, because they are user created and cannot be edited are devoid of spam - something that I didn't expect. The implementation is quite innovative. We'll continue to keep our eye on it and see how people adapt to the new feature. Thanks again for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Great thinking.
http://www.vimeo.com/4004089
Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for tweeting your post. Looking forward to spending some quality time here.
What's more I don't want someone to auto follow me. That whole trend has really decreased the value of what following someone is. I want to believe that when someone follows me, they have real interest in what I have to share and in engaging me. It's fine with me if someone doesn't want to follow me. I'm not interesting to everyone - not even close to everyone :)
When people follow me, I look through their stream and analyze whether that's someone I might be interested in. If it is, I go for the follow. Could I have more followers if I autofollowed? Sure. But honestly I would be ok with my follower count dropping drastically if it showed me who was actually actively following me.
Regardless I love the ideas and I hope you enjoy your new Twitter strategy :)
And I'm with you. I experiment with just about every little piece of tech I can even if I'm stumped as to how to use it. :)
But I think it's all well backed up. It's really not a numbers game. Kind of like how Facebook isn't about who has the most friends. It's about the connections. Although for me, Facebook is generally for people I already have relationships with, while Twitter (and Friendfeed for the matter) is so great for finding new people with new ideas.
I also think its crucial that people realize that a twitter follow != a facebook friendship. The initial relationship in facebook is merely a relationship, while on twitter it is simply one side saying they're interested in what the other might post. Now when I follow someone, I'm often hopeful that maybe that follow could create a relationship that would warrant a friendship on Facebook :)
But enough rambling, I loved the article and am pretty amazed at some of those statistics. I've never really studied the analytics and how they relate to my follower count.
You hit on an important point that I tried to stress in the beginning of the
article. Reciprocity (following back) actually DID work in the earlier eras
of Twitter. I think partly because it was new and exciting, and partly
because of WHO was on it (the geeks and early adopters) and the culture and
engagement they brought. Now it's a whole different ball game and it's not
impractical. Thanks for recognizing the difference.
Re: Twitter vs. Facebook. I've got a long article that talks specifically
about the difference between Facebook and Twitter that mirrors the points
you made in your comment. I'd happily continue the discussion with you on
that post if you're game.
You continue to stay ahead of the curve in your understanding of human interaction and how technology affects it. Very very very valued learnings here that I will definitely take something away from.
Cheers,
Ryan
I like to say that listening leads to whispering. You only whisper with the people that matter. It's focused attention.
Broadcasting is like screaming because attention dissipates when you scream. We humans automatically tune out the screamers.
Your analysis backs this up.
Back in June I made a list of people I listened to intently (64 people), I unfollowed over 1000 people and started back from scratch and then refollowed back the people on the list.
Since then I've applied the follow the tweeps of others when I get recommended. Ex. If someone RT's something I posted and then others rt that and I get a follow I''ll follow them back. Same thing with #FF, those are filtered and may be of some value.
Right now I have a good 1:1 ratio but still the SPAM is unbearable.
I think this is and will always be a work in progress.
Happy to listen!
I just e-mailed Nate that I felt the six degrees of separation today. Through a string of Twitter users and retweets, I came across your tweet that mentioned this article. Half way through reading, I see your mention of Nate, who is currenlty developing a website for me.
I also let him know that, in trying to reach out with social media and create a buzz even before the launch date, I created a Twitter account and had the mindset that the more followers I could "get," the more people would be aware of the site when it launched. That mindset has completely changed since reading this article...and I quoted the word "get" becuase it sounds so ridiculous to me now.
I just wanted to give you a big THANK YOU for helping spawn that positive change. :)
I'll for sure keep checking in here, because the comments and your replies and the overall discussion here is of even further value.
I agree with @mrdoornbos in that this article should be read and embraced by everyone.
Great work and thanks for sharing.
-Ginette
I'm glad you found this post, because it does help put the right ideas in your head about how to market your soon-to-be launched awesome site/app!
very interesting. I you went so deep into the subject.
This geekely clarifies the obvious: real relations with real people is the real value :)
Internet is becoming more interesting each day
I'm glad you find this pattern
Social media technology is becoming more sociology than technology each day.
I'd not be surprised if we end up needing a new profession: web app developers that are designers and socio-psychologists
Loved reading through this discussion.
-Ginette (@gbuffone)
I really like Twitter for keeping me updated "live" on some specialized topics + I love the possibility it enables to attend an event through a diversity of (wide) eyes/ears/senses (open): it is so enriching (e.g.: I attended an Oreilly seminar in Frankfurt this Tuesday and other people's tweets during the dashtagged event were giving me an accurate idea of what was going on in others groups... ubiquity is possible thanks to Twitter...).
I get food for thought on Twitter, and this is possible because those I follow have a perspective which is:
1) sharing "value-added" information - we look for debate, mind work even with people we know nothing about
2) this piece of information we share with one another, is to become part of the "cloud" and should be channeled to ALL those potentially interested who respect such ecosystem. Spammers' accounts do not respect it and should therefore be shut down.
Readers can be/are mostly passive. This does not mean that they are not interested in your Twitter posts - especially when they start following you... but they probably face the same difficulty as you did after a while: following too many and not managing to make sense of it anymore. The use of social media is rather impulsive and pushes us to follow new people every now and then, with the hope that our interests will be even better served - which we sincerely believe...but we keep following the "old" ones too, forgetting too easily that we have a limited amount of time to deal with the generated tweets stream.
The real problem is that we need to prioritize and Twitter offers no tools so far for managing the necessary prioritization. Will Twitterlists help? I am skeptical - but I shall try the tool. Personally, I believe it is more a matter of acceptance (users) and enforcement (Twitter) of a series of rules proper to Twitter's ecosystem which should be better specified/implemented.
Re: your comment on seminars and that ambient awareness that Twitter gives you - totally agree. It's especially true at the O'Reilly seminars I think - I first noticed it at ETech in 08 and Web 2.0 '09. The use of hashtags etc keeps honest reactions and information flowing so you feel a connection between the audience floor and what's happening on the stages in each of the sessions. Love it.
Please let me know how you find the Twitter lists and if you find useful best practices. Now that they've arrived and people are starting to play with them there will be significant amounts of adaptation and experimentation - so try stuff out and see what works!
I'm a big fan of Nate's and I'm so glad he posted a link to this column. I still don't understand the big deal about lists, seems like those tools are already available. But part of what makes Social Media so rewarding and exciting is the constant challenge of closely held ideas and opinions.
Thanks again. I look forward to reading more.
"what makes Social Media so rewarding and exciting is the constant challenge of closely held ideas and opinions."
Well said.
As to my Twitter experience, I've never auto-followed or used any automated tool to get followers - I follow people I find interesting, and only follow new followers who are using Twitter to have conversations and build relationships. I was fortunate to connect with amazing people early on, did my best to communicate and share relevant links. The ride from zero to 500 took a while, but the subsequent climb from 500 to 5000 happened over just six months, then things tapered off this Spring.
That change was not due to fewer new people following me, that number stayed constant, but because the ratio of people who actually use Twitter to build relationships (instead of broadcast spam) dropped from 90% to 5% - which is to say that I used to follow back 9 out of 10 new followers, but I'm now down to 1 out of 20.
I haven't tried the reboot yet, as TweetDeck allows me to follow a reasonable subset of followers (where I spend 2/3 of my time) while allowing me to still see the entire stream when I want, but at times I'm tempted.
"That change was not due to fewer new people following me, that number
stayed constant, but because the ratio of people who actually use Twitter to
build relationships (instead of broadcast spam) dropped from 90% to 5%".
I noticed it happening in early summer myself. And I was dying to try
rebooting for months. I'm actually glad I did though. Believe it or not, my
click through rate has actually gone up (I'm connecting more with people
that matter), my spam completely stopped and the utility I get out of
Tweetdeck and lists is way up.
following lots of people is quite as obvious as you seem to think it is.
Everyone uses Twitter a little bit differently - and if the ability to drive
traffic in big numbers was supported by the data, a lot of people (including
me) might be singing a different tune. While it seems intuitive that
"following more than a few hundred people" kills the value, there are many
tools out there like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite that allow you to filter your
list for your favorite people, searches etc
Since all Twitter posts are public and search is so easy to use, I find it is easier to look at tweets using search.
I never bought on to the follow a million get followed by a million hype as a path to get rich quick.
Thanks for the article.
you're interested in. filtering and focus on twitter to get value out of it
is key. Hopefully we'll start to see more innovation around real time search
in the months to come.
I have considered unfollowing for a while now and I think this blog post pushed me over the edge.
I was thinking If I un-follow all these broadcasters and spammers I can focus on connecting with more people and not have to digg through people to find those people to connect with.
I think i'm going to do that soon, thanks for the blog post :)
David
is actually UP from before. I'm connecting with more people, I get
absolutely no spam and I've been having a lot more fun. Good luck to you. If
you need any advice on how to best go about rebooting, let me know. I'm
happy to help.
Clay Hebert sent me over here and I'm glad. This is a great blog!
Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you got something out of this post. Btw
- love the tone of your blog. What a cool theme.
Things You Didn't Know About Me" Post that's linked in the sidebar for why.
;-)
I partially agree with you. I've been studying different twitter usage patterns and how the people I work with (professionals like lawyers, consultants and accountants) can use it to initiate and deepen relationships with the end goal of winning clients.
I've also been experimenting myself with building a big following (currently around 35,000) to see what impact that has.
Firstly a bit of nit-picking. bit.ly click through rates were very inaccurate in the early days. They way overstated clicks vs what I tracked via my site stats. So I'm not sure clickthrough rates have actually decreased. I think they may always have been very low and now they're just more accurately reported.
In terms of being able to use twitter to get new clients, there are two very different strategies which work in different ways. The essence is that twitter is a communication mechanism just like paper. Some people use paper to write personal 1-1 letters. Others use it to send junk mail or print magazine ads. Both can work in different ways.
The strategy that I've seen work best for most people (when I say people I mean my clients: lawyers, consultants, etc.) is to use twitter pretty much as you say - to build relationships with a small number of people. They often have as few as a few hundred followers - up to maybe a few thousand. But because they have meaningful interactions with those people over twitter, they deepen their relationships and eventually they communicate in other ways, have face to face meetings, and get hired.
Even with the aid of tweetdeck and other automation, it's difficult to keep up with this level of interaction if you have many thousand followers. Believe me, I've tried. You have partial conversations - but if you return a day later, all the relevant tweets have been overwhelmed by messages from the other thousands of people you follow.
What you can do is broadcast useful stuff - including the occasional link to your site. Your tweets end up being 80% broadcast and 20% interaction. It does drive traffic to your site. But as you say, given the very low click through rates (even when you're tweeting really useful, targeted stuff) you need a huge following to get a decent number of clicks. And a huge following makes it even harder to do deep interactions - it's a bit of a vicious circle.
Once on your site though, visitors may sign up and return or subscribe to your newsletter. Once they're there it opens up the opportunity for deep interaction again - this time via email or maybe blog comments.
But I would certainly advise anyone new to twitter to focus on building a small number of deep relationships rather than a huge following. Once you have a huge following your only options are to keep growing it to get more clicks, or to do what you've done and shrink down again (and potentially upset a whole bunch of folks).
Ian
almost all of what you said (especially your points about relationships,
attention and scalability).
A few things -
#1 I am aware of the bit.ly issue, but I think it's somewhat of a moot point
because of the huge degree of disparity between follower count and actual
click throughs - even a basic approximation shows the reality clearly, so
fine-tuned accuracy doesn't tell a drastically different story. I have been
studying this phenomenon over a long period of time, across a lot of
different links and users. Case in point - this post was Tweeted by Tim
O'Reilly (+1 million followers) and retweeted over 100 times and I still
only registered under 10K unique visitors that day in Google Analytics.
#2 - Hitwise data backs up the sentiment that engagement on twitter is
dropping off sharply.
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2009/10/...
#3 - Lists further segment the "following" in the ecosystem, and reduce the
potential for "incidental" clicks that big-following-seekers went for when
we all only had one stream.
#4 - the fact that big names (4 sited in the post) are dropping for a reason
- i.e. they arent seeing engagement or value. If they're willing to risk
ticking tons of people off (in Robert Scoble's case his total following was
over 100K) you know something about the reciprocation model is either
unsustainable or doesn't deliver value.
#5 - The true risk you have that you'll "tick off a huge amount of folks if
you reduce your following list to just the people you talk to anyway" is
perceived (fear), not actual. True, there is some risk that someone will get
pissed and go on a rant, but you should be maintaining following
relationships with people you know and talk to anyway. If a user you dropped
wasn't having conversations with you, and are just listening - nothing
changes for them - they still follow you. They'll only notice that you're
not following if they try to DM you...(hint:risk = low, especially if
they've never done it before). Bottom line: The people who are listening and
do care about you should stay on your list (you know who they are - the
number is between 150 and 300 of them tops)). Everyone else should go in a
list, or be dropped. Just as a matter of experience with the dropping - I
did not get a single negative Tweet after I made the drop - and I even
blogged about it.
#6 My click through rate has decreased since drop, and my follower count is
decreasing by a few followers a day, every day - this is what you were right
about. In order to build your ability to drive traffic you have to go for a
1:1 strategy. However, the number of new users you'll have to recruit to
follow you using an "i follow you, you follow me" strategy in order to
increase your average number of clicks per posted link is about 100:1 at
first, and that ratio decreases (subject to decreased marginal gain) with
every new user who follows you. If that's what you want to do...good luck to
you.I chose a different approach ;-).
Good to see the other stats - that makes the case for decreased clickthroughs stronger.
I'm still playing around with the clickthrough strategy - I get 10% of my blogs clicks from twitter so it's not an insubstantial amount. While I've got this many followers I might as well see what I can do with it. But certainly, if I was starting again I'd focus (as I said) on building a small, deep network.
If I was to unfollow folks, it wouldn't be the masses (who aren't watching anyway) I'd worry about. It's the small number of people who I really want to engage with. I fear I might forget to keep them on my list and they'd notice. Probably just paranoia.
I thought Erik J Heels did the right thing a few months ago when he mass unfollowed people. He did it in blocks of 1000 and essentially scanned each page of unfollows to make sure he wasn't canning someone important to him. But that took him ages.
A further thought:
the "deep relationship" strategy (I think) we agree is the best for most folks works (from a marketing perspective) because most of us sell things that require a relationship before people will by. Consultants, lawyers, trainers - people need to know you know what you're talking about and they can get on with you as a person before they'll buy from you. Twitter can do a fine job of this using the deep relationship strategy,
But most of the internet marketers and "gurus" don't sell services - they sell a product: an ebook, video, software, a newsletter, etc. They talk about building a "list" (man, I hate that phrase - it totally dehumanises your clients) and then selling to it.
So for them the "build a huge following" strategy is a natural extension of what they do with email marketing and the web anyway. And so that's what they tell other people they should be doing - even the majority for whom it's a totally inappropriate strategy.
Ian