I love Twitter, it’s a great networking tool and the perfect way to keep your finger on the pulse as a designer and social networker. With 140 characters you have to be succinct but informative, but it’s easy to be lazy and just parrot what you’ve already heard. There’s a responsibility to add value, and it’s easy to do.
Worthwhile Retweeting
Last Friday Louis Gray talked about his opposition to retweeting. Louis argued that the very act of retweeting is lazy. I disagree. Retweeting of good content is an important part of Twitter and adds a lot of value. Good content deserves a wider audience, and retweeting helps highlight great posts and online resources.
I noticed in the last week that I’d still changed my behaviour in response to Louis’ post. I realized I agree with one point he made, that simply copying and pasting to retweet is lazy. With a shortened URL and giving credit to the original author you still have about 100 characters to add value. Now I add a comment about what I’m retweeting. Something like “great post, good argument, didn’t agree with conclusion. http://url RT @user”.
Retweeting adds value to Twitter. Copying and pasting cancels that added value. Get the best of both worlds by retweeting with your own contribution.
Fixing #followfriday
The last show from David and Marc at the ever excellent From The Couch talked about the weaknesses of #followfriday. I touched on the same weaknesses recently when I talked about the use of #hashtags on Twitter. #followfriday has a great ethos, but it’s turned into a day where people just post huge lists of @username. That’s no benefit to anyone, it doesn’t add value and it gives me no information on why I should follow any of the recommendations.
I only recommend three people on #followfriday because I want to say a few words about each of my recommendations. I think that’s more worthwhile than just posting a list of people to follow. David and Marc also suggested that you dedicate a tweet per recommendation, which is also a cool idea. My favorite recommendation came from Daniel Thomas in the comments of From The Couch.
Or start doing a follow friday theme. Today its about CSS, Next friday it’s about Top South African Bloggers who wear the same hat as me. That might help weed through the muck and mire
#followfriday still has a lot of potential, but the value is being lost. Rethink the way that you recommend others and you can boost their profile more effectively and make #followfriday more successful.
2 Comments
Your commentary was valuable and the use of reference and opposing commentary helped provide an unbiased image. With a tool such as Twitter it becomes imperative to continue to add to the overall worth. How would you RT those posts that are already pushing near 140 without trampling on the value already contributed by the original source?
Thanks for the feedback.
I think most initial tweets, particularly those with links to articles, cite the full article title. That takes up most of the 140 characters, but I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary so long as the link in there. So I remove that.
Basically I remove everything other than a link and the @person to acknowledge the initial writer. Everything else I’ll make my comment. Obviously in what ends up approx. 100 characters there may not be massive insight, but I’ll put my own comments and thoughts with a link to the original source. That means that I’m adding value, but also spreading the original info and giving credit to the person who made the original tweet.