Teaching Twitter When You Don’t Know It

After finding her via @mqtodd, I looked at the @BloggingMentor Twitter account, read her blog article, “9 Twitter Tactics: What Works For You?” and wish to offer a few ideas for the Blogging Mentor, Annabel:

1. You get great interaction on your blog, you surely know what you are doing with blogging.

2. Many people use Twitter, few understand it, how to filter the noise, and derive real value from it. This doesn’t keep too many people from marketing themselves as a Twitter Tipster (if not designating themselves the local rockstar/guru and mayor of the coffeeshop nearest them). Please don’t follow in their footsteps, Annabel.

I have for you a little story of interaction on one of my blog posts, within LinkedIn. This may shed light on a case of nearly the opposite phenomenon: as many as those who profess to hold the keys to the castle in using Twitter are the many who find only noise and believe Twitter to be overrun with it.

To my blog post, “#JpQuake: Better Info From Twitter,” which I published on my blog and then also forwarded to a few LinkedIn groups as a discussion (something to do with a blog post, BTW), I got this reaction to Dan Baum who cIented “Better info from twitter? Twitter isn’t always exactly a source of factual logical reporting in these situations. Bashing Tepco? Does Iwaisan have any constructive comments that could help the situation? Twitter should be renamed the arm chair quarter back network. I stopped Twitter 20 min after the quake.” Annabel, I am reminded of your Twitter Tactic No. 4′s “…I do think it’s a bit odd to follow 76,000 people on Twitter when there’s no way you can read all those tweets.”

I replied:
“People are sharing some great sources of news, as I am, when I come across them, and they’re not all CNN or NHK. Live updates, and when you have the sources I do, you get more from Twitter than the TV, etc. Just look at what @good_people has tweeted (Jason’s timeline) the last few days. Much of it, I would have never found otherwise. And thus, I retweet the most important items. After all, that account has just under 800 followers (lists are another story) following it. I retweet, and 17,600 get it – @osakasaul. We help spread what’s important in this way.”

He then added:
“Hear what you are saying Saul. Specific linked in threads are for better sources . Twitter uselessness varies from 90 to 100% . There is just too much panic nonsense to filter. Googling is far more efficient. That being said, how do you filter through the nonsense?”

I replied:
“I would wholeheartedly agree with you, Dan: the Twitter uselessness you describe, I would estimate it to be 97-98% and that is just for my OsakaSaul acct. However, that is based on all accounts that my OsakaSaul follows. There is a good way to reduce that 97-98% down to about 30% which, since tweets are brief, skim-readable, is easily tolerable for me: make lists of your real go-to sources of info for this topic, that topic, and then column those lists in Hootsuite. If you would like to SKYPE with me, I will gladly screen-share and show you what the results are – before you go about doing so yourself, Dan.

** Should we speak, be sure to ask me about the value of those I follow who are not in those lists that I look to, and how I get anything done, if I read each and every one of the tweets of @AyPee @mqtodd @good_people @fransgaard… As I do with all of my “inner circle” people’s tweets.”

The lady, Annabel Candy, gets great interaction, many comments per article on www.successfulblogging.com. This I know to be true. She does know blogging.

I recently read her http://www.successfulblogging.com/9-twitter-tactics-which-ones-work-for-you/ and having done so, I have to wonder, in this age of self-publishing, free publishing, off-the-cuff blogging, is, well, look at her account yourself: @BloggingMentor Should she be teaching Twitter – or perhaps doing more learning, initially?

About Saul Fleischman

Founder of emerging social media tool sites. Bootstrapping innovation with lean startup development teams. I do project management, user experience, PR, marketing and community development.

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