may 03, 2010 02:09am – in Korea
By Mike Pearl
As an avid Twitter user, I have watched users join, peak their head around, and ultimately bail. I've watched users join, grok it, and stay. And lastly I've watched users join, fail to see the point, and stay anyway; This is the problem crowd.
The ones who "get" Twitter seem to intuit a set of guidelines that make following them a pleasure. The rest are wandering in the desert, living lives of Twitter Sin, needing to be shown the error of their ways. For those who need it spelled out for them, I say unto thee: Follow my commandments, or I shall not follow thy tweets.
1. Thou shalt not double or triple tweet on one subject. If the thought is too complex for 140 characters, simply link to your blog where you can be more detailed, or skip the thought altogether. Otherwise your followers likely won't read it. They've come to Twitter to read the compact wisdom that a character limit creates. Think of this limitation as a gift, and don't be afraid to take the time to rigorously self edit. Push toward that character limit; Seeing an overcomplicated thought chopped up and simplified into a tweet is part of the fun.
2. Thou shalt have a point of view. Those who don't tweet are in the right to criticize Twitter as a place where narcissists simply announce every banal event of their lives. But it would behoove those who wish to use Twitter to its fullest to not follow said narcissists. There is nothing inherently wrong with tweeting that you made toast, but what does this toast say about your life? What larger concepts or problems does this batch of toast speak to?
3. Thou shalt not exceed three tweets in one hour. Unless there's an election being stolen, and Twitter is being used to fuel a popular uprising, there's not usually anything so urgent going on that you must tweet moment-by-moment. Most likely what you're documenting if you do this is your stream of consciousness, mixed with some remarks about what's making you LOL at the moment. And most likely what I'm reading if you do this is something else.
4. Thou shalt self-deprecate, not self-aggrandize. That plate of fines de claires oysters you're enjoying? That yacht ride you're on? Yeah, we hate you for it. Yes, all of us. If your commentary about the oysters is that they're not up to your standard of freshness and you feel like that's all the commentary Twitter deserves, I won't be following you for long. A bit of cutting self-awareness or irony in moments like this can save you from ending up on Tweetingtoohard.com
5. Thou shalt distill the list of who thou followest down to those thou actually readest. Another option is to use the new "lists" feature, and put all your real life friends on it. This will ensure that rather than shitting your thoughts into the abyss, you're keeping alive the concept that Twitter is a conversation. It's frustrating when you @reply to one of your friends' tweets and they don't even notice.
6. Thou shalt keep the meaning of thy tweets transparent. Think of twitter as a room you enter throughout your day to have a conversation with some friends. If you walk in just to quote a song lyric without attribution, or say the word "Pineapple!" without anything around it, yes, we're confused. Mission Accomplished. But we're not thinking "What an interesting point of view this friend of mine has." We're thinking about unfollowing you.
7. Thou shalt not just complain. This may be a rule for how you conduct yourself more than a rule of Twitter. Are you a complainer? No one likes a complainer. Twitter is here for you if you have a problem, but if all you do is whine, you're not doing it right. Here's how you can self-test: When you post about your problems, have people stopped @replying? That's because they're not even reading your whiny tweets anymore.
8. Thou shalt not be a link regurgitation machine. The occasional link with commentary is a welcome part of the global conversation that is Twitter, but are you just copy>pasting everything you're reading on Digg? Your friends probably would have seen that lolcat eventually on their own. Either that or they already did. You're not The Internet's central meme filter or tastemaker. Leave it alone.
9. Thou Shalt strike a balance between in-group and out-group tweets. You should definitely post special tweets just for your close-knit group of friends. But what about the friendly acquaintances and well-wishers who follow you? Don't make them regret reading your tweets. Post for the general population 50% of the time or more. And whenever possible, start an insiders-only tweet with an @username so outsiders won't even have to see it.
10. Thou shalt not use Twitter as just another place to feed updates from other web services (like Facebook, Flickr and Youtube). As I keep saying, Twitter is a conversation. If your only contribution to the aforementioned "room" is that occasionally a robot walks in and announces that you marked a YouTube video as a favorite, then we get what you're hinting at: "Don't bother following my Twitter. If you're really interested, make friends with me on a site where I am active."