I've now logged into Twitter twice. I had one reply to my first tweet, and posted a thank you. I was absolutely amazed that CILIP are now following me. Surely they must get swamped with tweets if they follow anyone who follows them in return. Can they possibly read them all? They generate quite enough tweets by themselves. Is it a binding rule (unwritten or not) that if someone follows you, you must follow them back, even if you have no interest in them?
If the tweets from CILIP came as full emails, I might read them. However, I don't have the time or patience to navigate to and from lots of different webpages. That's where the 140 character thing lets Twitter down. Often there isn't enough in the tweet to even let me know if I want to visit the link.
If the tweets from CILIP came as full emails, I might read them. However, I don't have the time or patience to navigate to and from lots of different webpages. That's where the 140 character thing lets Twitter down. Often there isn't enough in the tweet to even let me know if I want to visit the link.
Hi there it's me @CILIPinfo here!
ReplyDeleteI came across this blog post and I thought I better explain.
Firstly it is not a binding rule that if someone follows you, you should follow them back. But I choose to follow people back for a number of reasons. The main one is that I am interested in what CILIP members and potential members think about CILIP, libraries etc. and I want to connect with people, network and and find out more.
Also if I follow people back then I can send them Direct messages via twitter and communicate with them privately if necessary (sometimes it is necessary too).
On being swamped with tweets, I avoid this by using Hootsuite to help me manage the situation. I have various searches for particular occurrences of words (e.g. CILIP, cilipfuture etc.) arranged in columns of tweets and I follow these quite most closely. The rest of the stuff I only dip into occasionally so I'm not spending all day reading everyone else's tweets - that would be crazy!
On the topic of there not being enough in the tweet to let you know whether or not you need to visit the link, I will try harder to be more informative in this regard in future!
Kind regards,
Richard Hawkins
I'm amazed that you found my blog. I kind of assumed that possibly others doing the 23 Things programme in Cambridge might read it, but not anyone from outside.
ReplyDeleteI'm new to Twitter, and all the Web 2 stuff, and would probably not have been blogging or signing up for Twitter if it wasn't for 23 Things. It's interesting to know that you can manage tweets from large numbers of the followed, though I don't envisage ever having to need to find out how! (I somehow doubt that you are going to be troubled by hundreds of tweets from me ...)
Hi again,
ReplyDeleteActually a colleague here at CILIP told me about your blog post, but I could have found it easily enough had I been paying attention to http://socialmention.com - give it a try, you can search for things in twitter, blogs, social bookmarks etc simultaneously. It's very handy for finding out where the 'conversation' is and going there to interact with people.
And remember that different people use twitter in completely different ways so you shouldn't feel like you need to have an army of followers to be using it 'properly'. In fact some might argue that there's no point in getting too into it when you can simply follow the main people and keep quite nicely up to date that way. Of course there's plenty to be gained from total immersion too though!
Anyway nice talking to you, best of luck with the 23 things and say hi on Twitter sometime :-)
Richard Hawkins