C’mon people!
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that started out by asking us: “What are you doing?” Big mistake. Instead of interesting slices of someone’s life or cogent and pithy observations, we get tweets like “I have a headache” or “Bad day at work.” Who cares?
Then it morphed into being asked to post the answer to “What’s happening?” That spawned its own crowd of uninspired ego-tweets. Now I get Poynter tweets re-tweeted about seven times and people seemingly racing to be the first to breathlessly tweet some big news in an effort, apparently, to bolster their online status.
Here are my commandments about tweeting:
1. Tell us not what you are doing (“I have just become Grand Poobah of Ed’s Bar and Grill on 4sq”), but what you are thinking about what you are doing. If your only thought is “M-m-m. This beer is good,” you should be embarrassed and I don’t need to know. No one does.
2. Don’t post just links 17 times a day. No one has the time to read all that stuff, including you. And you know who you are. I got a little caught up in this, and I am going to stop. Links to your own blog are okay.
3. Don’t over-tweet. Sending out 23 tweets about what is going to be in your publication tomorrow is not acceptable, no matter how much you need more readers. It is annoying and makes me want to NOT read your publication. If it is a “happening now” event, I will get the news from television or radio. Avoid shameless self-promotion.
4. Don’t tweet personal information. You may be a wonderful person, but I don’t care if you are having a bad hair day, that your cat did something really, really funny or that it is sunny outside (I don’t even know where you are, in most cases). Save your “friendly” updates to Facebook, where people are more likely to care about you.
5. Don’t make us go to twitpic.com or similar sites to look at a photo you took that is, frankly, uninteresting and often delivered without context. We get enough context-less information already.
6. Don’t ignore the wonderful limitation of 140 characters by immediately sending a second, continuing tweet. The whole idea behind Twitter is you get 140 characters and that’s it. Period. If you can’t finish in 140 characters, don’t bother. Edit thyself.
Admittedly, I am a bit of a curmudgeon and my computer is being recalcitrant today, affecting my mood, but I am rapidly tiring of tweets drifting toward the jejune. Can’t we just tweet along?
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