Since I first wrote about the psychology of twitter back in February, other professionals have chimed in (with confusingly similar titles for their own blog entries on this topic), including this one which is …
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To me, twitter is about connecting and networking with people who have similar interests to myself.
I’ve been using it for over 6 months now and really enjoy using it. The majority of the people i follow are people from all over the world and I follow very few people who I actually know.
Since it has become more popular and people are starting to talk about it with friends, I still have not gone searching for my friends to see if they have a twitter account. I’ve known twitter as a port to people all over the world and to meet and chat with new people. So to me the idea of having friends on twitter is not a favourable scenario. I will continue to use twitter for networking and discussing new ideas, rather than socialising and keeping in touch with friends.
Personally, I will continue to keep it separate from my personal life.
Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?
Anyone where I can start my own blog.
John – thanks for your very thought-provoking insights. I’d like to comment on 2 of your observations about Twitter’s uniqueness:
(1) Describing Twitter as the “always available ‘cocktail party’ conversation …”
More correctly, when there actually are such 2-way conversations going on – and in my own relatively short time (5 months in 2 former accounts) with the application, these are rare – the typical Twitter experience resembles tuning in to only ONE side of such a conversation. Sure our timelines might contain other users’ “@ replies” but we seldom are given the contextual thread. Blame the character limit? Anyways, if a user wants to properly converse with another over the Internet couldn’t they more efficiently use a different platform – one that’s more threaded, personal and private? (chat, Skype, even email!)
(2) That Twitter makes it “easy to catch up with your ‘followers’ anywhere,” etc.
In fact it’s not your followers you catch up on, it’s they who catch u’p on you. While the core members of ‘followers’ and ‘the followed’ may be the same individuals, in many cases they are not. Remember each tweet you make appears only in the timeline of each follower. An interesting study of user behavior would be determining the % of users whose dominant preference is to tweet (active users) versus those whose preference is to read tweets (passive users).
One thing that is outside the scope of your article, but that I have a big gripe with, is the almost universal lemming-like mindless obsession to acquire Twitter followers (by fair means or foul). I use the term lemmings deliberately because this practice sure is a killer strategy. Because of this I recently ceased twittering under one of my accounts which had “organically” achieved a relatively small (1.5K) number of followers. The noise from the high % of useless tweets was a real put off in trying to sift out any occasional gems in my timeline. My new approach, and one that’s working a treat, is to be careful who you follow, be very careful!