Twitter and such

Posted on: 27 August 2012

Twitter's great. But it's not without its foibles.

A few observations I've made:

When someone says something nice about you (or your company, depending who your Twitter account represents), especially if it's meaningful, the most common thing to do is Retweet it.

The intention "Wow, look at this nice thing someone's said about me (/my company), I want to shout about it!"

In reality You're preaching to the choir; you're sharing with people who already follow you, who need no further reason to follow you. Ideally, that retweet would be much better suited as marketing to non-followers.

You want to mention someone, but it's not personal to them and you want the tweet to appear on all your followers feed. So you end up sticking a dot in front of their name, or referring to them as "that @guy"

The intention You want to mention someone, but it's comedy gold so you want everyone to see it

In reality It just ends up looking a bit desperate, unless you're clever enough write it in a way that doesn't say "This tweet is so important and funny that I want everyone to read it". Which leads me onto...

The #fb hashtag

The intention Share your tweeting gold with not only your Twitter following, but also all your Facebook friends.

In reality Despite this being a fairly uncommon method of sharing your social-media-platform-agnostic thoughts, I cringe every time I see it. As a continuation from the above point, it screams "Oh my god, this tweet is so golden I want to share it with ALL MY FOLLOWERS!"

Don't get wrong, the concept of social media - more so, Twitter - is not lost on me. I'm aware many people use it as a means of raising their ego and self-marketing themselves, but there is a level of subtlety and tactfulness that should be observed if one wants to avoid looking like a douche.