What type of tweet will you read?
Half a billion users generating 175 million tweets a day. How does one decide what to read? Who to follow? Twitter has become such a dominant force in the social media tools that business uses, it pays to find out how you can use it to your full advantage to reach your customers.
The Harvard Business Review, May, 2012 (p36-37), has an interesting article with research done by Paul Andre of Carnegie Mellon University, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Institute of Technology. The article reported the results of a survey that was done asking 1,443 users to rate the quality of 43,738 tweets.
The results, summarized below, show the type of tweets that generate a positive as well as a negative image for the person or company that posts it:
Best types:
- Random thoughts (funny, witty)
- Self promotion (links to one's work)
- Questions to followers (crowdsourcing by posing questions)
- Information sharing (for acquiring new information)
Worst types:
- Opinion/complaint (whining tweets)
- Me now (what are you doing right now?)
- Conversation (Preceding a quote or retweet with a personal response)
- Presence Maintenance ("Good afternoon")
And of course the literature is full of great information on how to improve your presence on Twitter. Check out a few of these titles:
"The key is to be aware of one's audience and how different people's values may differ" says one of the study's authors.
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