I really like Twitter. It has connected me with many more great people in the last two years than any of the other Social Media channels I participate in. A while back, I started using Twitterfeed to send a tweet whenever I posted a new blog entry. Shortly after setting that up, I noticed that Greg Verdino had a separate Twitter account for his blog feeds. I asked him why and he told me that it allowed his followers to decide whether or not they wanted that information. I considered doing the same, but figured that posting a new blog entry qualified for “what are you doing”, so I left the feed as it was.
Recently, I loaded Mobile Scrobbler on my iPhone and set up a new Twitterfeed that listed the most recent song that I had listened to every 30 minutes. As a music lover, listening to new music is “what I am doing” a lot of the time, so this seemed a natural thing to post to Twitter. It generated some great conversations about music and connected me with a lot of new friends who also introduced me to some other great artists.
It also had a downside. Several people whose friendships I value, stopped following me. I didn’t know why, so I half-kidding, I asked “was it something I said?”. The answer I got was that the frequent tweets about what I was listening to was just adding to the noise in their Twitter streams. In other words, the music feeds were not adding value to these followers. Curious, I publicly asked my friends in Twitterville whether they liked or disliked the music feeds. I got about a dozen replies with the opinion split about 50/50. OK, some some people find it to be of value, some do not, and some of those find it annoying enough to stop following me altogether.
That got me thinking about what I wanted to be using Twitter for. Before I follow someone, I check out their blog or website and look at their recent tweets. If I see something that looks interesting I follow them. Usually, the people I follow are saying much more than just what they are doing. Meaningful interaction is more important to me than reading a bunch of 140 character status updates. Following over 700 people, it’s easy to miss the valuable tweets because of the noise, so If someone I am following stops being interesting or never interacts with me, I stop following them.
Which brings me to my dilemma. At the end of the day, it’s important to give your audience something of value or they will just a soon take their eyes and ears somewhere else. Posting music feeds is clearly a “what are you doing” thing and some of my audience has found it to be valuable. On the other hand, I can see how it can be noise to someone else and I don’t want to drive away friends who I otherwise have interesting conversations with. The solution it seems is to follow Greg Verdino’s lead and create a second Twitter account for my music, photo and blog feeds; which I have just done. I have turned off all Twitterfeeds into my main Twitter account (which you can follow here). If you want to keep up with the other stuff, by all means follow me here.
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