CaseStudyMe: How I use Twitter | Format

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Twitter is now over three years old and it’s grown up fast. But it still sometimes feels like we’ve only just begun to really understand some of the ways in which this type of real-time social connectivity is transforming our relationships and is impacting on our institutions and businesses.

I’ve been Tweeting for just over a year (use http://whendidyoujointwitter.com/ if you want to check how long you’ve been on Twitter) and I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit over that time about how I can best use Twitter. Though everyone has a theory on how we should be using Twitter, I wanted to share my own learnings with you about what I’ve learned over 385 days of Tweets.

I’ve broken up my learnings into four posts, which I’ll be releasing over the next few weeks:

Format
Content
Tools
Connections

Format

What?
I’m slowly developing a formatting style on Twitter, which looks like this:

As well as ‘Asking’, ‘Listening’, ‘Sharing’ and ‘Smiling’, I’ve also started tweets with:

Reading
Commenting
Blogging
Helping
Downloading
Laughing

This list is far from exhaustive and will no doubt expand in the future. As well as the active word at the start of the tweet, the rest of the format breaks down like this (click the image for a slightly larger version):

Why?
A key objective of my Twitter use is to provide as much utility for my followers as possible. The Tweetstream flows insanely fast for many of those followers and so I want my tweets to be very clearly structured so that the active reason for me tweeting is immediately obvious.

By standardising the format I hope to make it easier for my followers to quickly digest and process my tweets, and at the same time it speeds up my tweeting. That’s the theory anyway.

I’d be interested to hear back from anyone that follows me as to what they think of this format. I’d also love to hear about people out there who are using their own formats when it comes to Twitter and to hear their experiences.

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Thanks for stopping by again. Did you know you can also find me on Twitter?

Tagged as: CaseStudyMe, twitter

Lachyw

Great post, lookin forward to the rest of them :)

tonyhollingsworth

I'm so glad you posted on this Scott as for some time I've wanted to post similarly on how I use Twitter and how it has evolved (one day I will do a "Why I Tweet and why you should" type of post)

I've been evolving my use of Twitter too - I'm always learning from others, finding new ways Twitter can be used, and finding myself just smiling knowing we now have Twitter, and trying to remember what life was like without it.

Honestly, I think your approach is fine, and makes perfect sense. As an observation though, I find when I see "structured tweets" (say like yours with the | character, or other tweets with symbols or some other "cute" syntax) the first thing I think of is they are either machine-generated, lack the human touch, or there is some other agenda such as a commercial message.

The beauty of Twitter is its lack of rules, and although it can be frustrating to read poor grammar and spelling, case-insensitive sentences and so on, at least I feel its a real person, a real conversation. Of course, having read your blog post here, when I see your tweets I know they will be real! Not everyone is as open and transparent as you with their online presence :-)

There are a few syntax/etiquette rules I think really work well for me:
- when I re-tweet somone else's tweet (RT), I try not to change any text unless its just grammar or brevity to ensure the tweet still fits in the 140 char limit.
- if I do change the wording to suit my own interpretation of someone's tweet, I tend to use "via" or "HT" (hat tip)
- I use the http://is.gd URL shortening service - there's no analytics, but it's simple, and very short! I wonder about tools like Stumbleupon that you use, what benefit is there of the analytics side, tracking your URLs. Isn't it the same to just RSS or FriendFeed your tweets, you can always find the links you shared?

Finally, another tip to encourage serendipitous connections, which I believe is one of the real gems of using Twitter. It's so easy to become acquainted with new, great people using this tool. I miss the earlier version of Twitter which encouraged this by showing you, for anyone you follow, every tweet they send. Recently (6 months ago perhaps) Twitter changed their logic, whereby when a tweet mentions someone (the @ reply) you would only see that tweet if you too were following that person.
The workaround is to either place words in the tweet prior to the @ reply, or a convention is used to place a "," and a space prior to the @ reply. This ensures you see the tweet even if you aren't following that person. This is rather hard to explain in words. If you or your readers have questions about this I'd be happy to elaborate,

Enough for now, thanks for sharing this and look forward to the ongoing posts.

Cheers
Tony Hollingsworth

Scott Drummond

Hey Tony, thanks so much for your thoughtful and engaging comment. My thoughts in response to yours inline below:

"As an observation though, I find when I see "structured tweets" (say like yours with the | character, or other tweets with symbols or some other "cute" syntax) the first thing I think of is they are either machine-generated, lack the human touch, or there is some other agenda such as a commercial message."

I love this point Tony and it was a concern of mine when I started formatting my tweets. I only use the formatted tweets when I am effectively broadcasting messages to Twitter, and if conversation stems from those tweets then I am not rigidly formatting those conversational tweets.

"I wonder about tools like Stumbleupon that you use, what benefit is there of the analytics side, tracking your URLs. Isn't it the same to just RSS or FriendFeed your tweets, you can always find the links you shared?"

I don't use http://su.pr not to find the links I have shared. I use it because it gives me an idea of which of my Tweets are performing well (for me this means conversations generated and retweets generated). The added benefit is that my content (links, my blog posts, anything else in my tweets) is exposed tot he StumbleUpon network and thus more serendipitous views from people who use that service. Of course, there are other services (such as bit.ly) that provide stats - perhaps consider testing one of these for a month and see whether you find any value in tracking the stats on your tweets.

Not sure I fully understood your final point but thank you for taking the time to read the blog post so thoroughly and to reflect on it. I'll get Part II out very soon :)

CaseStudyMe: How I use Twitter | Format

Format

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