I won't try and sell you on Twitter, but I'll tell you how it's useful to me as someone who produces a web site about space.
I won't try and sell you on Twitter, but I'll tell you how it's useful to me as someone who produces a web site about space.
I'm following more than 170 people, who update at least once every few hours. I don't have the time to read all of the updates, so I don't. But I do try and pay attention to my feed when I'm taking a mental break, grabbing a snack/lunch, and so on. That being said, here is what I find useful:
Networking. Twitter is a decent way to connect with people without being creepy, a sort of pre-e-mail contact method... something between a chat room, a status updater and a room full of people. Let's say I visit Joe Bob astronomer's blog and his Twitter username is clearly displayed there. He's a great blogger, so I follow him. If I don't have his e-mail, I can can use an @joebobastronomer in my tweets to flag his attention or if he beings to follow me, I can send him a direct message.
To extrapolate this example some more, let's say I see him reply to other Twitter users; e.g. @janebobastronomer. Well I'm curious who this "janebobastronomer" character is, so I click over to her page — hey, it's another great blogger I didn't even know existed.
This snowballs over a couple of weeks, and suddenly I find myself integrated into a community of space bloggers, popular science publication editors/writers, private spaceflight proponents, NASA co-oppers, etc. I'm not sure how else I could so easily and quickly get the attention of these people without being creepy.
Content sharing. I'm a pusher of content, so I want people to have as many ways as possible to find it — and Twitter is great for that. I tweet a teaser line and a link, and hope that someone following me finds it interesting and re-tweets (which is why you sometimes see "RT" at the beginning of a post), snowballing interest in the article/interview/op-ed/etc. and driving traffic to the site.
It's also easy to share things you find interesting, sort of like a low-tech Stumbleupon (that's a different can of worms, and perhaps more important to me than Twitter — see www.stumbleupon.com/about).I find that people usually tweet the most interesting, entertaining, or useful content they seem to find on the web — so it's essential when it comes to staying on top of the best new content on the web.
Community pulse. By occasionally checking out what links people are tweeting, I get a very good sense of what people like — and that's very helpful to me for getting ideas. In the shoes of a freelance, I'd think tapping into a subject-driven community would also be useful. You could better stay on top of your beat, helping you pitch the best content ideas to your publisher.
In a nutshell, it's a big tool in my belt to find the best content out there and what people find interesting. Valuable information.
Personality. Part of my job description is to be accessible to our audience, and not be a wizard behind the curtain. Yes, Twitter helps prop up egos...embarrassing, but true.
"Other." I'm always finding new ways to use Twitter.
To loop back to networking a bit, there are some people out there who are almost wholly inaccessible — except through Twitter. Case in point, the "Mystery Team" that is competing in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. I wanted an interview with them, but they didn't want anyone to know who they were. Solution: I direct messaged them, set up an online chat, and interviewed the team leader. I got a neat interview, and they maintained their incognito status. Sure, I could have gone through GLXP's media relations, but this all happened within the course of three minutes. So Twitter can be an extremely efficient contact method.
Want another "other" example? Last week I put out a call for students who would like to guest blog for us. Within 10 minutes, I had five e-mails in my inbox.
The Rules. I've been doing this for a few months now, and I've learned some unspoken rules of Twitter:
Don't spam. Some of the SciWri08 people were tweeting so much (i.e. every few minutes) that it was a little annoying. You don't need to tweet every point made at a
conference and you need to be conscious of the fact that posting in quick succession fills up people's pages. If it's not that useful, people will stop following you (and you'll soon be tweeting on your lonesome).
Share links. If you're tweeting about a piece of content, you must give us a link or you'll be "that guy" who doesn't have a clue. Also: Use a free URL shortening service scuh as is.gd or tunyurl.com.
Show some personality. If you're just sending out links to your own content or whatnot, it's kind of boring. Mix it up a little by sharing other sites' content.
Acknowledge tweets directed at you. If you receive an "@" reply (there's a tab to filter just these on your Twitter home page), it's good form to "@" the user back (e.g. "Hey @disco_dave check this out: http://url.com" to which I'd reply "Thanks @user, that's really interesting and I'll be sure to blog about it"). As you gain more followers, you'll get more of these and will have to ignore the less important ones so you can maintain a shred of sanity. I'm not at that point yet, but know some very popular Twitter users who are.
There are other more mundane details, but I won't bore y'all with them. Also, I don't profess to be a Twitter pro. Some people have thousands of followers while I have a fluctuating number around 170, but that number does go up each week. So I'd like to think that I'm doing something right.
Dave Mosher is web producer at Discovery.com.
(NASW members can read the rest of the newly redesigned Winter 2008-09 ScienceWriters by logging into the members area.)
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