The RIGHT way to use Twitter
Sorry, but there isn’t one.
Just like there isn’t a RIGHT way to use any tool. RIGHT suggests that the only other alternative is WRONG. Life’s not that neat.
For me, Twitter’s beauty lies in its deceptive simplicity. Simple because it’s just 140 characters of text; deceptive because such an elegant format creates the potential for great complexity.
There are an infinite number of ways to use Twitter. The only instance in which some of these might be WRONG is when one assumes that everyone is trying to achieve exactly the same thing. Again, life’s not that neat.
People and organisations are already using Twitter in different ways: the ones that makes the most sense for them. This might mean talking to directly to your consumers (actual and potential), e.g. Zappos, bringing a fictional character to life, e.g. Aleks the Meerkat, assembling geographically dispersed family members, e.g. Tim‘s Whirledgeclan, or even rigging your house up to the service, e.g. Andy Stanford-Clark.
We need to resist our natural urge to anchor the new and unfamiliar in a bed of rapidly fossilising structures, terms and understanding.
Instead we might be better off treating Twitter like a prop in “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”: a fantastic opportunity to improvise.
This post was inspired by a conversation that was instigated over at the We Are Social blog.
true dat. but i am interested in a kind of etiquette to using twitter, and i think it goes back to your point about people assuming that you’re using it for the same reasons/in the same ways they are.
like, i seem to be under siege from individuals twitterers whose sole aim is to create a huge follow list for themselves…and all they seem to tweet about is how you can do the same.
it’s really cool for brands to be on twitter, because communities of interest naturally spring up and because you can extend the creative, as shown by the examples you’ve cited. same goes for your stephen frys and wossys. they get massive follows, but that’s ok because they always have interesting things to say. whereas these self-proclaimed marketing gurus only seem to hammer home the same message each time.
so in my meandering-around-what-i-mean kind of way, i guess what i mean is twitter is a beautifully simple thing to be explored and exploited, reinvented and reinterpreted. just worth thinking about a golden rule of etiquette online, offline, wherever: always be interesting.
Hey James,
The “social media pros” are always a turn off for me too. I guess they aren’t for everyone though – otherwise they wouldn’t have as many followers as they do…
Not sure there is a “golden rule of etiquette” anywhere. That sort of assumes that etiquette means the same thing to everyone and that everyone is trying to achieve the same things.
N
Have to admit dude, I saw the title of the post and thought “not another post on how to use it!”
But I should have known better. Just like you said, there is no right way, experiment, simplify and pimpify. Use it (and any other tool) the way you want. And if someone (like Scoble for example) uses it in a way you hate/don’t get don’t bring out the firing squad – he’s getting something out of it so maybe we should all try to do that in our own ways.
Awesome stuff. Boom.
Right on Sam.
And you should know better than that
I stand corrected dude.
All too true. The simplicity of it is proportionally inverse to its versatility. And it’s fun looking at how people use it differently – funnily enough it reflects how people are different to start with.
I caught up with one of my best friends a couple of weeks ago (Who is not in advertising/marketing/blogging/etc) and she had registered to Twitter a couple of months before, but I thought she wasn’t really using it. Surprise to me, she tells me she’s completely addicted and loves it – she follows almost all the celebrities on there and uses it as a sort of live and personal gossip column. Why not? I thought it was pretty cool.
Hey Willem,
Thanks for the comment and sorry it took me so long to OK it as not being spam…have been away from internet for a while!