The Twitter Explosion

Thanks partly to frequent mention of Twitter in the Red Tops, as well as a few high profile celebs joining the network, usage is rising steeply. Newcomers are trying to understand how to use it. Several will fall into the trap of treating it as a broadcast channel, others will be too commercial, and others will fail to recognise the kind of behaviour that inspires trust. And some will get annoyed at the supposed mis-use of the system.

Which is why this quote from Rands is pertinent:

Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I’ll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you’re following a newsbot, you’re going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can’t stop RTing, you’re going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, “Why do these cars keep hitting me?”

Whole, really rather good article is here. Pub-sub, baby, it’s the future and it works! And it’s this mentality that’s meant my experience of twitter hasn’t changed for the worse during this growth period.

It doesn’t come as a huge surprise that the traffic increase is reflected in more corporate accounts. I’ve mentioned in the past that social media stops being social when it adopts a commercial tone of voice. And one-on-one engagements count for more. I kind of ran the company twitter feed at my last place, which I’m convinced helped us to engage with a savvy audience (176 followers, which ain’t bad), and we’re going to explore how it can work at The Team.

Letting anyone post whenever they want hasn’t really worked, so we’re setting up a simple twitter experiment. There are many people at The Team who are on Twitter, and they have a wildly diverse portfolio of work. Only 1/4 of our staff are in the Digital team, the rest being involved in Brand, Marketing and Employee Engagement. So we’re going to take it in turns guest tweeting from week to week, to use Twitter as a social tool for sharing our varied outlook on life.

If you want to see whether this experiment works, you can follow us here.