Summary: Twitter has some great uses, but it isn’t something you can understand from the outside. Here are some benefits and how Twitter delivers them.
The Background
The other morning I listened to Matthew Wright (The Wright Stuff), guests and callers all pontificating on the nature and value of Twitter (“Isn’t it just people posting what they had for breakfast? What a waste of time!”). And I laughed like a drain.
I laughed mainly because I was put forcibly in mind of a group of village biddies discussing the party in The-House-Up-The-Road, like Les Dawson’s Cissie and Ada. They weren’t at the party, but they were happily judging it, finding it lacking and full of wasters.
Twitter, though, isn’t a party you can understand from the outside. It isn’t really a party you can understand by creating a profile and looking in at the window. It isn’t even a party you can fully understand by having a dozen or so connections. You can disagree on the figures, but I don’t think the party starts for you until you have 100+ connections – of whom most were previously strangers.
So, forget the 140-character concept and the intricacies of ‘follower and followed’ for a moment. How would you like to do the following?
Find lots of like-minded people, all around the world, in a wide variety of sectors
Probably one of the most valuable things you can do in business or career is to create what Mark Granovetter called ‘weak ties’: people you’re on easy speaking terms with in a wide variety of sectors. That’s where the opportunities and inspiration lie; not in your collection of 99 fellow web-developers or garden-landscapers.
I now have Twitter connections everywhere, and can be discussing hockey and robots with @alexeld in Cheltenham, my HTML problems with @simonashley in Stroud, Cambodia with @natmandu in London, market research with @John_Clay_R4 in Warwick, and the wilds of the Louisiana Purchase with @snowvandermore in the USA – all at once. Diverse enough for any measure, and no dressing up required. How does your usual networking compare?
How does this work in Twitter?
The nature of Twitter is that you also see the conversational snippets of your contacts, like one end of a phone call. If the one-sided conversational snippets are interesting enough, you will probably investigate the other person, and decide to follow them too. Now the conversation makes sense and you have a potential new contact. Unlike in a chat-room, you are not having to listen to the input of the angry, the ignorant or the verbose. This makes a huge difference to people’s enthusiasm for connecting, and therefore their availability for it.
So starts the intriguing and growing mesh of people: before you know it, you and your most like-minded contacts are all connected to the same people, sharing conversations and bringing new people in as they find them. Every day on Twitter, I’m discovering new and interesting people, with whom I share humour, information and links. This simply doesn’t work in the same way, so quickly and easily, anywhere else.
Laugh yourself stupid
All through life, you’re drawn to people whose attitudes and humour match your own. Like attracts like. Birds of a feather. All that stuff. Usually, though, you’re stuck with all the ones you can’t bear, too – the ones who just stare when you strike your wittiest remarks, or who are just relentlessly negative. How would it be instead to be surrounded constantly by those who make you laugh like an idiot, or who leave you grinning in wry recognition?
How does this work in Twitter?
It works simply because you only see those you find interesting – and those who disapprove of you will probably stay away (or you can block them if they annoy you). Effortless.
So, there is likely to be a steady stream of pithy comments and responses which, because they are so brief, hit you right between the eyes – leaving you laughing like a fool at the screen. The brevity of the 140-character limit forces people to be fabulously creative to get the idea across in a few, punchy words; and there are always some contacts who bounce off each other like comics on a panel game show.
Get support on a crappy day
In most relationships, the interaction isn’t at all deep and meaningful, but commonplace and casual. Being online in Twitter is rather like sharing an office – maybe you don’t know your contacts deeply, but you know them well enough to sympathise with the broken ankle, dumped relationship or hated job. These may look like nothing from the outside, but they are the necessary little strokes we all need through the day.
How does this work in Twitter?
Well…you post it, and people respond! Of course, it might be with sympathy or it might be derision. Maybe humour and practical help. Just like real life: extraordinary, hey. This does require, though, that people give a damn – and that will be because you have been contributing to people’s discussions. Relationship-building-in = relationship-reward-out. This is the bit that most people who deride networking don’t get: meaningful networking is about intimacy.
Be guided to the best information
Information overload is the bane of modern life: either you ignore it, and fall behind; or you read it all, and get nothing else done. There needs to be a way of both knowing what you need to know, and knowing the best/key articles.
How does this work in Twitter?
On Twitter, you can follow any number of people who specialise in providing the specific up-to-date information you’re interested in. The links to the articles just arrive on your screen in your tweets stream. What’s more, if you need to know something specific, it’s very likely one of your Twitter contacts will know that answer, so you can just post the question and a response is likely to come quite quickly. Also, popular article links will tend to be retweeted (i.e passed on to others) in ever-expanding ripples, carrying with it the social-proof of value.
Promote your personal brand (i.e. YOU)
If you’re providing a service, it’s important to allow people to know the personality and character behind the website. Many an excellent service, I’m convinced, is under-selling simply because the website is too clinical, because there is no humanity there. Me, I want to spend money on services, I understand that quality comes at a considerable price – but I’ll not spend a penny until I have a full and pleasing sense of the person providing it.
How does this work on Twitter?
You can learn a lot of what you need to know about a person through your interactions with them on Twitter, and it will probably come to you naturally. Likewise, people are learning the same about you. So, the more you can relax and be you – ALL sides of you, including the flawed – the more people will like and trust you, and want to buy from you. The flaws aren’t the problem – it’s the attempted hiding of them that is.
You can also use Twitter to announce your blog articles (where, of course, you are fully demonstrating your attitudes and knowledge). I know that the moment I post a link to a blog article, upwards of 700 people could [theoretically!] be inspired to go and read it. And if they like it, they may pass it on in a retweet to their own contacts – the ultimate Twitter compliment for a writer.
Create business connections and collaborations
Well, who’s going to say ‘no’ to that? Although some people are on Twitter just to while the day away, and others are on there to hard-sell their wares, the true value is in the connectivity – which you can either use effectively or allow to slip uselessly away. It’s already there, waiting. I’m going to use it.
How does this work on Twitter?
Because of the weak ties and personal branding I described above, this is the perfect environment for those little seeds of collaboration to germinate. Talk to anyone who regularly uses Twitter in the way I’ve been describing, and they’ll tell you of the interesting face-to-face meetings they’ve been having with other Twitterers. That’s another thing that the Twitter-deriders don’t get: people are meeting up. Many people don’t like meeting up with just anyone, or with randomly-selected people in a room. Twitter can serve as a filter, so that the ice-breaking has already been done, common ground already established.
Finale
So, those are my six main reasons for using Twitter. I hope I have managed to explain how Twitter’s functionality causes or allows it to happen – in a way that no other service does. Yes, there might well be talk of sausages eaten at breakfast (probably in some inappropriate way, given my friends); but that’s just a small part of the whole.
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