It seems to me that the user isn't given enough control over their feed, and so my feed seems to be largely filled by frequent posters, and I don't actually get to see what infrequent posters have said unless I go to their profile. I'd prefer a second feed that just showed everyone you're following and what their most-recent tweet was (or most-recent 2 or 3 tweets).
I solved this problem by using Twitter's "Lists" feature, which I wasn't aware of when I wrote the comment above. I feel like Twitter should make that feature more obvious in their web app, maybe by having it featured somehow on the 'Home' feed page. They could have a side-box that said "Custom feeds" (or, I guess, "Lists", to use their term) and if you didn't have any, it would have a button that said "Create / Add custom feed" or something like that.
The information you're getting from people is kind of random. You aren't being fed only those ideas which are relevant to some decision you immediately face.
There's no automated system for enforcing politeness (AFAIK), and so apparently a lot of the comments are mean-spirited.
The 140-character limit seems like a pretty good precedent for having restrictions on the content that people post. You could have users elect to either participate or not participate in certain restrictions, and then other users could limit tweets that they saw based on whether that tweet came from someone who had those restrictions enabled. Or they could kind of do what YouTube does, and have users flag the tweet as mean-spirited / racist / inflammatory / etc. and allow users to hide such content from their feed / DMs.
It seems like a bunch of people on Twitter treat it like a game, where the aim is to see how many people you can get to follow you. That seems like it might lead to bad behavior.
It may not be necessary to spend time with Twitter if your main goal from using the platform is to be able to have some product you create promoted to people. You can instead simply DM / email people who have followings that would find that product useful. That's what the Instagram guys did.
Counter: For many users, that is not the main reason they use Twitter; for example, it can be a great way to develop friendships with high-quality individuals who can later help you.
Many people on Twitter will read your tweet and form an opinion about it...
without first taking the time to fully understand the context in which you sent it.
without first taking the time to double-check that they are not "putting words in your mouth" / misreading what you said.
based on another user's interpretation of what you meant.
The large number of people on Twitter makes this problem more serious that it would be if the community was smaller (like, say, a forum).
"what you get is the wrong message retweeted one million times"
In the comments:
Twitter is a useless medium for having any sort of nuanced, conversational interaction. You're guaranteed to eventually fall into a misunderstanding with someone that can't be addressed without posting 10 tweets in a row and looking crazy. It certainly works much better as a broadcast medium and for giving occasional shout-outs, high fives, and anything you know isn't going to go beyond a short, positive interaction (i.e. not discussions, refutations, arguments, corrections, etc.)
I took a month off of Twitter after a very prominent Twitter user retweeted a sarcastic observation I made to his half a million followers without any context.. for which I got a whole ton of shit from busybodies. After I returned, I basically vowed to keep things clean and unambiguous, to focus on using Twitter to achieve my aims, and to just block anyone I'm not interested in seeing immediately. It has worked quite well so far.
I share the frustration. If I spend 15 minutes thinking and writing something, I want people to spend more than 15 seconds trying to understand what I'm saying.
Twitter is a very interesting medium because it makes it extremely easy to communicate with interesting people, but with the 140c limit it often results in misunderstandings. That makes it a terrible platform for heated debates about somewhat controversual topics
"I just thought, Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place," he said. "And this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life. … It's like taking the bar exam at Coachella.
"I've said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically. Because suddenly that's the litmus test for everything you do..."
"There's no way to find any coherence when everything has to be parsed and decried."
the steady stream of just like, 'You suck, you suck, you suck' [on Twitter] — I don't really think I need to visit You Suck Land anymore."
"I so appreciate when people took the time to say something nice. But for my own self, it's like, at some point, you're just like a little compliment leech. That's not going to help your writing any more than people slamming on you."
I just had a little moment of clarity where I'm like, You know what? If I want to get stuff done, I need to not constantly hit this thing for a news item or a joke or some praise
"I think the articles that I found, I can find elsewhere," Whedon said. "I'll miss some jokes..."
the dirty secret of Twitter is “Nobody clicks”; his own typical “engagement rate” on a link he posts is 0.07 percent, and ever since Twitter gave us the button to look at the “analytics” for individual tweets I’ve come to the conclusion that Dash’s engagement rate is actually unusually high–or at least higher than mine.
“Twitter is like doing cut-rate cocaine at a boring party where a lot of the guests dislike you.”
the ancient social ritual of gathering a bunch of unrelated strangers in a space and letting them bounce witty anecdotes and observations off each other to see what develops.
Praise: I’ve made friends on Twitter that I’d count as good friends; I’ve spoken to people who met their spouses on Twitter.
Praise: The feeling of just not being alone, of being able to see other people reacting to things at the same time you are–that’s the most seductive and most addictive thing about social media.
Parties are a great way to network, to make new friends, to have fun. They’re also a great way to throw time down the drain hoping to do all of the above things but failing to do so
Joss Whedon points out that it’s the compliments, the retweets, the favs that kept him constantly reloading his Twitter app. (...) You become like the attractive person who goes out just to get validation that you are in fact attractive.
Yes, Joss got harassment on Twitter. (...) yes, the constant static of haters probably played a role.
I have had to deal with angry trolls crossing over to abusive phone calls, attempts to hack my accounts, being doxed, etc.
you do have to deal with a relentless steady stream of people deliberately trying to fuck with you and ruin your day–and even after you get high-profile enough that it stops being worth your time to engage, the constant low-level irritation of hitting Twitter’s notoriously unreliable “Block” button gets to you.
very little seems to come out of my tweets–the exception is when the mob is riled up, at which point I can expect every tweet I’ve ever made to get dogpiled and dissected
too much easy stimulation, too much rapid-fire shallow interaction, too much noise.
You can use this to browse for interesting things, similar to how you browse your Facebook wall (which was based on Twitter's feed IIRC)
...but really it seems like you should ignore the home feed and just use list feeds instead, since there are a lot of people you'll want to follow for some reason or another who'll usually just fill up your feed with information you aren't interested in.
You can also use this to spot new tweets from people you're following as soon as they come in, which can help you be among the first to respond to them and thus (hopefully) get some of their followers to look at your profile.
Be one of the first 3(?) people to comment on something that someone with a lot of followers has posted.
Say something interesting, which will make people want to look at your profile.
What to say:
Ask a question other people may want to ask.
How to say it:
Be polite / respectful.
Post something.
If you write a blog post, make it a tweet as well.
Things other people tweet about
General topics I've decided I'll tweet about
Things I'm working on
If I work on a particular page of my wiki on a particular day, I can tweet a link to that page.
My blog posts
Ideas of things for me to tweet about
My transcription of the books shown in Marc Andreessen's library
My digging up all the different music that notch / levels listen to while coding.
tweet a link to a page where you'll describe how you use twitter, and then pin that tweet.
How to think of Twitter
It seems like it's basically the same as Facebook, except where the connections generally aren't based on real-world connections as much as intellectual ones (you generally follow people based on whether you like their ideas or not).
Submit blog posts to HN / Reddit that become highly-upvoted, and have a link to your Twitter at the bottom of the post.
Apparently levelsio got a bunch of followers this way.
Create something (a web app/service), submit it to Product Hunt / HN / Reddit, have it highly-upvoted, and link to your Twitter from the web app/service.
Apparently levelsio got a bunch of followers this way.
Have someone on Twitter with a lot of real followers (followers who would find your tweets helpful) retweet a useful tweet of yours.
I have seen levelsio getting retweeted by people with far more followers than him, and I suspect (but have no evidence) that it has helped him grow his following.
Get prominent / high-follower-count users to follow you, and when their followers look at your profile and see that the high-profile person follows you, they may be more willing to follow you.
You can get prominent users to follow you by replying to their tweets / helping them, and by having your list of tweets (as seen on your profile) be, on average, useful to that person.
As mentioned here, long-time users of Twitter may notice if your tweets are not getting a 'normal' level of comments/likes/retweets given the number of followers that you have, and that may lead them to believe that you have purchased fake followers, which may make them think less of you, which may in turn make them less likely to follow you.
If a person has more followers than they are following, they’re probably a good person to at least consider following. If they are following more than they have more followers, the opposite may be true. (...) If they’re ratio is close to even, they may be worth looking at on a case-by-case basis.
if you’re only following say 20 people, and you’re active on Twitter, you probably see just about everything each of those 20 people say. That’s the reason people have started setting up separate accounts just to follow the people they really want to follow.
I was wondering how Marc Andreessen uses Twitter since he follows so many people, and I suspected this was what he was doing.
Reason: Having huge follower numbers and low post engagement numbers looks ridiculous.
Real followers have real value. Amassing a large number offollowers means Twitter will view you as an influencer. Once you reach that level, you can end up "stealing" a search result (e.g., a conference hashtag) because Twitter curates popular tweets and "pins" them at the top, which means you can potentially get millions of views from anyone searching for that hashtag. [And what he leaves unsaid is that if your followers are fake, your tweets will presumably not be considered 'popular' by Twitter's algorithms because the tweets won't actually be getting retweeted / replied to.]
Don't give people a reason to follow. Try to create a high-engagement tweet. Give them a unicorn — share the rarest, greatest-performing tweet you've ever done as your Followers Campaign.
I think it's worth noting that she only has 1,602 followers as of 2017.06.06, and her tweets seem to get ~1-2 'likes'. So these ideas may not work if you're trying to get up to ~20k+ followers.
I mentioned my location
One afternoon I mentioned that it was a glorious day in Naperville at North Central College. The account replied to me, retweeted me, and all of a sudden I had a slew of Naperville-based businesses and Naperville-centric accounts following me.
I mentioned smaller brands in Tweets
when I mentioned how much I love Chicago-based Forever Yogurt in a blog post, I really wanted to let them know. So I mentioned them in a tweet with the link. Not only did Forever Yogurt follow me back, but they also retweeted the article. Soon enough, some of Forever Yogurt’s followers started following me. I accidentally got followers and exposure.
I replied to bigger brands
when Disney asked about their theme parks, I replied. Within a matter of minutes, I had at least ten new Twitter followers, and all of them were fellow Disney fans (or travel agents that wanted to sell me a Disney Cruise package). But why? Then I remembered that when you click on tweets from the web version of Twitter, you can see which public users reply to those tweets.
I used Buffer to schedule relevant articles
be one kick-ass content curator. Find other awesome people or brands in your niche and share really great articles. You’ll now be a source of excellent information that lots of people will want to follow.
I mentioned individual authors in Tweets
getting recognition for a blog post feels awesome. (...) In addition to doing this for independent bloggers, I would start singling out authors from big multi-authored sites like Fast Company or Mashable. (She then shows an example) Both of these fantastic writers started following me once I mentioned them by name.
Examples:
The Productivity Secret of Professional Writers http://bit.ly/zkBXyR via @jeffgoins
Marvel Announces Big Digital Comics Push, But Will It Fly? http://bit.ly/z7CZry -- great article via @fastcompany by @robsalk
I replied to users that mentioned other users
if they ask a question [of another user], I’ll reply. If they post an article that I find interesting or helpful [and reference the author], I’ll tell them.
I Wrote Guest Posts [and had my Twitter handle in my bio at the end of the article]
The etiquette I'm currently following
If someone asks you to (re)tweet something to help them promote it:
it's OK to do it if you believe in the product...
...but it's also OK to later delete the tweet to keep your timeline focused on your ideas.
How to undo a retweet / remove a retweet from your timeline:
Log in to your Twitter account and click the "Tweets" link below your name to view all your tweets. Retweets appear in the same section. Retweets have a green arrow in the upper-right corner of their box. Locate the retweet you wish to delete and then click the "Retweeted" link below the tweet to delete it. The "Retweeted" link changes to a "Retweet" link. (Source)
How to get notified when someone mentions the name of your website.
?
How to shorten links: they're shortened automatically. (Source)
How to see a user's early tweets:
Advanced Search, or using the search bar: "from:username since:YYYY-MM-DD until:YYYY-MM-DD"
Twitter - First Tweet - An official part of Twitter that shows you a specified user's first tweet. Pretty cool!
AllMyTweets - When I tried it out it only seemed to go back ~1 month.
