Just Twittering on..

While I was musing about this blog, the term 'just twittering on' popped into what I loosely call my mind and immediately rung a bell. The note lingered long enough to tell me that that is what many people seem to do, just 'twitter on', like someone at a party trying to impress, while not really saying anything and certainly not making any real friends.

This I thought cannot be the right way to use Twitter, it must be used to engage a response and not "I'm not following you" or "I'll just block you then" either. So how do you do this, how do you start a conversation. Well in a networking meeting you would ask an open question wouldn't you.

This sounded like a good idea, but I thought I'd test it somewhere other than Twitter (where to date my open questions and those I've seen have not been too hot) and so posted a 'discussion' on to Linkedin (best not to have all your social networking eggs in one basket). The question was an open one, asking people to share their successes on Twitter.

Perhaps the question was not the best, sort of like 'So what success have you had in using a piece of string?' to which of course came the inevitable reply 'depends on how long the string is'.

In my instance the question did get a better answer than that, but only one and it was not the type I was expecting, but it did help me (Linkedin is by the way one of the best place to get high quality answers to questions).

The reply was:- 'Depends what your promoting. A lot about Twitter is not just sending out tweets but interacting with your followers. Let them know you're a real person on the other side and not just a "sales machine". Make sure you're tweets are short enough so that followers can retweet for you. There's a lot more to maintaining relationships on twitter!!'

As you can see it was a good answer, it says a lot. It tells you to

1. Ensure you interact with your followers
2. Make sure that they know it is you and not an autotweeting machine
3. Don't try to sell, sell, sell
4. Do short Tweets so that they can be retweeted without loosing some words
and finally
5. That there is a lot more to maintaining relationships on Twitter than you might think

All of the above is good stuff and all very very true.

It did not answer my question though. Is this a bad thing, did I get more than I bargained for? Well yes in a way, but that is what an 'open question' can lead to isn't it?

So open questions are the way forwards then? Perhaps, but here I am not sure as Twitter is very different from Linkedin. The two communities are therefore likely to act in different ways, so the 'open question' might work on one but not another. Certainly to date my open questions on Twitter have not been as successful as I'd have hoped.

So, my next step is to ask the same question on both, and I will report back with the results, plus of course any answers to my question "SO how do you start a conversation on Twitter?"

By the way, on the success front. I can report that we've had several good contacts from Twitter and so far one piece of work. Also 15% of traffic to our website comes from Twitter now.

All good stuff indeed and thus I will keep 'Twittering On' (but I will try to make it interesting).

More tomorrow