Story Review

These may have been suggested already, but I haven’t seen them. And I’m wondering why.

- A Twitter client. Actually *the* Twitter client. The only one that’s official. This could be a hard sell on computers, but an iPhone app could have some legs.

- Private Twitters. It’s an official communication tool now, so why not use it for internal corporate communication? A space where your tens of thousands of employees can tweet among themselves without privacy worries.

- Tweets. Twenty a day should be enough for everyone to tell people what they ate, show off their cat and rant about a public service. Those who would also like to live tweet, hype or spam will have to pay. This one I’m not entirely comfortable with, what with all the democracy that’s been going on on Twitter. But after all… Am I a cold, heartless capitalist bastard or what?

@alisongow asked if she could search her Twitter favourites for a specific tweet.

The Twitter favourites search ninja says

Yes, she can. However, Twitter search is no use in this case. @alisongow should go to her Favourites on twitter.com, get the RSS feed for them and subscribe to it in Google Reader. There, she can search that feed in Google Reader. Hay-ya!

Ninja picture by orvaratli.

Market-research firm Nielsen last week reported, and later backed up with fresh data, its findings about Twitter’s audience-retention rates, suggesting the microblogging tool may be facing a slump in user growth in the future.

Apparently, fewer people are returning to Twitter after they initially sign up than did return to Facebook or MySpace when those social networks had comparable user numbers.

It seems logical that the “bounce rate” for Twitter would be higher than that for the other two networks. After all Facebook and MySpace are pretty straightforward and people rarely have to wonder what they are all about or how they can be used. Twitter, on the other hand, is one of those things where finding new, and possibly unique, ways to use them is a substantial part of the fun. It makes sense that as it goes mainstream, the number of people who don’t “get it” and drop out of using it will increase.

Indeed, Twitter evangelists have long recognised the fact that a great deal of people will require some kind of a guide if they are to keep tweeting. How-tos abound.

Until recently those were compiled by twitterers who simply wanted to share what uses of Twitter they have found for themselves. Most posts had largely the same structure. You kick off by saying how you couldn’t get Twitter at first, but how you then started to find various applications for it and how you can’t now live without it. Then follows a list of the things you use it for. The focus is on “that’s how I use it, see if that works for you too”.

But as marketers and PRs have flocked to Twitter, influence-measuring tools have sprung up. Now those are busy people, they don’t have time to read blog posts on how Twitter can be used, let alone explore. Much better to have something as hard and measurable as influence to worry about. Sure enough, Twitter-analytics tools now give you advice on what you should do if you want to be a “top influencer” within your network.

Suddenly it is no longer about discovering Twitter; it is about participating in conversations (by @replies and #hashtags), adding “signal” to your tweets, etc.

I’m not saying those are bad things. But one of the best ways to learn stuff is by simply listening to what people who know more than you have to say. You can join a conversation by just shutting up and taking in others’ points of view. Just because you’ve chosen to be silent doesn’t mean that you need to improve your Twitter behaviour. So do yourself a favour: unless influence is really the thing you’re looking for, ignore those who tell you what you should do and just keep exploring what really works for you. Tweeting is fun; you don’t need someone to stress you out by telling you how much you suck at it.

Do you use a Twitter client? Have you set it up to filter your messages? I do.

But is that completely ok? If you go through the Twitter how-tos that abound, one of the things you are absolutely sure to encounter is that on this social network one follows people who are interesting to them. So if you follow 200 people and they are all interesting to you, why would you need to filter some of them out?

Maybe it depends on the filters you apply. For instance, you could filter your Twitter stream for messages containing specific keywords that are of interest to you. Whereas those 200 people all have something interesting to say, they do not always only say interesting stuff. That’s alright then.

The reason I feel queasy about filtering my tweets is that I don’t actually pay as much attention to the keywords. There are several people whose tweets I don’t want to miss and they go into my “friends” group on Tweetdeck. Then there are about 20-30 other people who I find interesting and they go into another group. I also have columns with my @ replies and direct messages. And that is about all the Twitter messages I can handle.

The question is then why do I follow 200 people. Well, I genuinely believe that most of them are very interesting people. It’s just I can’t get to grips with the volume of their collective interestingness.

Unsure whether I was being right or just silly, I put a poll up on ask500people . Here’s what people had to say:

stevematthewson – Twitter in its pure form is a simple chronology, not always a useful way of navigating something. Filtering different friends, types of friends, argument threads etc is not much different to using categories on a blog, is it. If I chose to subscribe to different RSS themes off the same website, it doesn’t mean that the information is less important to me does it?

AlisonLDP – I don’t filter other than to put my ‘local’ followers together so I can track their questions to me more easily. Otherwise, I tend to enjoy the randomness of my Twitter stream; right now I’ve got everyone from an expectant dad who’s wife is in the labour ward to a discussion on suicide, to myriad links (including yours). I may not read them all but their all worth my attention to decide whether I want to peruse them further or not. Twitter is like wading through a river for me; it’s there to be jumped in and enjoyed. If people annoy me, or I find I’m just not interested in their tweets (and I’m not saying their boring, just not relevant to me) then I unfollow.

JonathanDeamer – It can be “wrong”, as in the case of people who follow thousands in order to get followed back, but then don’t actually pay any attention to all those that follow as they’re filtering via Tweetdeck etc.

But filtering can simply be a case of being actually being *more* interested in what those you follow are saying. I know I don’t want to miss out on tweets from any of my “real life” friends, so I filter them in Tweetdeck. Similarly, I have a filter to group all music industry people together, so I can refer to this when necessary (eg. work) or follow conversation on a topic as it develops, without getting distracted by people tweeting on other topics.

jodygodoy – Just started using twitter and until this question I had been wondering how people followed several hundreds! At this point if I really want to see what friends are saying I can click on their timeline, but it sounds like filtering will make it easier as I follow more people.

Using Twitter for customer relations is something we sort of all know can be done yet is often overlooked in various “guides”. A cursory glance across the Twitter how-tos on page one of Google results for the question how to use the microblogging social network shows none of them mentions that option.

I have received great customer support via Twitter and am slightly surprised this potential use of the tool does not get as much hype as others. Here’s what I’m talking about:

And that was not the first time. This blog post explains how the guys at Rypple helped me out when I had a problem with a bug on their website.

And Sam Shepherd has shown this can work at news organisations as well.