I'm a huge fan of Twitter as a way of interacting with my professional public. It's a good way to make connections with people I might not otherwise get the chance to engage with (even very big fish can interact with you when the cost is only 140 characters) and to be situated within a large professional network. It is also, if you're in a sphere that has a lot of Twitterers, *fantastic* for current awareness -- if there's a big issue in my field I hear about it fast -- news, analysis, opinions. It helps me filter what I really need to be paying attention to and what I don't.
I find that the experience of Twitter as a logged-in user is very different from the experience just looking around the site. In particular, it looks a lot more trivial when you're not logged in because you'll see everything in a person's feed. When you are logged in, you won't see their @-replies unless they're talking to someone you both follow. (That is, if you tweeted something, and I responded "@tomchampion zomg that's so awesome!", other people would only see that if they were following you AND me -- and if they were, they'd be more interested in those trivialities of our relationship...)
I think good users of Twitter have a mix of the more informative and the more personal. People or organizations who only ever post links are, frankly, usually pretty boring to follow, because there's no engagement there. Even if the information is high-quality, they're missing out on the opportunity to make me feel connected. On the other hand, people who only post minutiae aren't going to hold my attention (unless they're actually real-life friends of mine and I care about their day-to-day lives). Similarly, I think best practices include posting your own content (meaning stuff you've found as well as stuff youv'e written elsewhere), but also retweeting others'. This is especially true if you're representing an organization; engaging with your community and local organizations by valuing their content makes you part of the ecosystem.
Also I think it's important to recognize that people will vary in the tools they use to read Twitter and how comprehensively they read it. Some people will read everything posted by the people they follow; some people will just dip their toe into the stream and see what's happening now. So it's not a great way to get news out unless you plan to be posting it repeatedly, at different times. I think it's worth trying out a few different Twitter clients to get a sense of how the user experience is different, and also to get a sense of what features you like (and keep in mind that the features that are important to you are likely to change over time, particularly if you end up following a ton of people).
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Date: 2011-05-19 07:08 pm (UTC)I find that the experience of Twitter as a logged-in user is very different from the experience just looking around the site. In particular, it looks a lot more trivial when you're not logged in because you'll see everything in a person's feed. When you are logged in, you won't see their @-replies unless they're talking to someone you both follow. (That is, if you tweeted something, and I responded "@tomchampion zomg that's so awesome!", other people would only see that if they were following you AND me -- and if they were, they'd be more interested in those trivialities of our relationship...)
I think good users of Twitter have a mix of the more informative and the more personal. People or organizations who only ever post links are, frankly, usually pretty boring to follow, because there's no engagement there. Even if the information is high-quality, they're missing out on the opportunity to make me feel connected. On the other hand, people who only post minutiae aren't going to hold my attention (unless they're actually real-life friends of mine and I care about their day-to-day lives). Similarly, I think best practices include posting your own content (meaning stuff you've found as well as stuff youv'e written elsewhere), but also retweeting others'. This is especially true if you're representing an organization; engaging with your community and local organizations by valuing their content makes you part of the ecosystem.
Also I think it's important to recognize that people will vary in the tools they use to read Twitter and how comprehensively they read it. Some people will read everything posted by the people they follow; some people will just dip their toe into the stream and see what's happening now. So it's not a great way to get news out unless you plan to be posting it repeatedly, at different times. I think it's worth trying out a few different Twitter clients to get a sense of how the user experience is different, and also to get a sense of what features you like (and keep in mind that the features that are important to you are likely to change over time, particularly if you end up following a ton of people).