Twitter Experiment – Why and Day 2
To Twitter or not to Twitter?
I have been hearing all the arguments for Twitter for a while. Even though I run a software / website development company, I tend to be slow to adopt new technologies. I don’t want the latest version or the latest fad and I’m too busy to try the latest great toy out unless I see value from the getgo. If it’s not going to grow our business or our customers’ businesses, then I probably don’t want to know. Fortunately our Creative Director, Jeff, just loves all the new stuff and raves to me about all the possibilities for this and that as it comes out!
We had a great conversation yesterday about Twitter – pros (mostly Jeff) and cons (mostly me). Jeff says it’s important to be part of the online conversation and a great way to come in contact with people you would never have come across otherwise. I was trying to figure out how to find anything useful (there’s so much information out there – I find information filtering more of a need than how to get more information) and whether it would take a lot of time or whether it would actually bring value.
The Experiment
Being experiential and empirical, I decided to try it out and see what happens. Is all the Twitter buzz true, or are the people I know who say that it’s just a big time consumer right? Will it actually add value to our company to have a Twitter account?
I already had a twitter account created, but had never done anything with it. So yesterday I went in, found a couple of people I know & a couple of people I don’t know but who are in our industry (franchise and franchise services) and set it up to follow them.
For those like me who have trouble finding anything useful in the default twitter search, Jeff sent me a link to a good search tool; search.twitter.com, which allowed me to find some conversations that I found interesting. I also uploaded a picture, set up my basic profile, and changed the background image.
Day Two
This morning I was surprised to find that I had acquired some followers – some of them the people I had chosen, but also a couple of others. Note that at that point, all I had was a profile – no tweets, nothing. I did do a couple of tweets today, and found some very interesting links to a variety of websites and articles that are useful and/or interesting.
Time spent so far: probably 2 hours (some of that figuring out how it all works, some of that browsing the tweets & profiles).
Questions so far: with so many tweets coming out, do most people just browse the most recent ones from the people they follow, or do they really go through them all from when they last checked in (even skimming)?
ROI: aside from the interest factor, nothing so far, but I have learned about some interesting people out there & seen some good websites….
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