Some people don’t seem to get Twitter. I mean, not how you can write 140 characters and post them on the web, but how to get the best out of it.
You see, many use Twitter to promote their businesses. Which is fine, mind you. The problem is, sometimes people just think they can flood their Twitter account with messages and get something useful in return.
I’m talking specifically about this guy here. He is a good writer. I’ve read his book Convergent Space. It is excellent, I highly recommend it to everyone.
But apparently he just can’t use Twitter decently. He advertises his book, and retweets messages from readers, friends, whatever, all at once at a very specific time in the day. Something like 2 or 3 dozens messages spurted in half an hour. Every day.
There are two reasons why this is wrong.
Firstly, it is a bit annoying because if you follow him and happen to have a Twitter client always running for “business” reasons, like I do, basically you get a truckload of notifications, and you end up ignoring them altogether.
Secondly, and most importantly, if his followers don’t have Twitter open at the time the flood hits, they’ll never see his tweets, because they’ll soon get buried below newer messages.
I suggested him to schedule tweets, one every once in a while, adding two clarifications, and he suggested me to unfollow him. (It is actually the second time I suggest him to rethink his Twitter strategy, and his original response was the same: unfollow).
You see, Twitter is about people, not about SEO*. You’re not trying to impress a bunch of servers, but a bunch of humans (your readers in this case). Annoying them, or simply making sure they’ll never see your tweets, is not a terribly good idea.
@ConvergentSpace: I hope you’ll read this. Don’t take it personally, it’s just a suggestion. If you still think you’re using Twitter the best way to boost your sales, fine, I’ll just unfollow and leave you alone. After all I’m just a whiny reader.
* Besides, Google ignores links in tweets altogether, so if you’re doing SEO, then you’re doing it wrong.