1 Good Reason – Social Marketing

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) If you’re not “Getting Twitter” it’s because you’re not following enough people yet.  Improve your signal to noise ratio to the point where you can ignore the dumb Tweets and enjoy the ones that matter to you.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone say, “I tried Twitter and I just don’t get it.”  I’d have a whole big, honking, heavy pile of nickels.   I think that the main reason many people don’t get Twitter is a basic signal to noise ratio problem.  How much signal is there in your Twitter steam compared to the noise?

SIGNAL= useful, meaningful, inspiring, interesting, informative, or entertaining.
NOISE  = useless, nonsense, clutter, time wasting, depressing, confusing, empty, irritating.

If the signal to noise ratio of your Tweet stream is not 20 to 1 or more, meaning at least 20 tweets of signal to each tweet of noise, then you are very likely to not “get” Twitter.  As this ratio gets lower and lower the more irritated, annoyed and fed up with the whole thing you will be.  Conversely, as the ratio gets higher (30-1 or 50-1) the more enthralled, useful and valuable you will find Twitter.

How do you fix a bad Signal-to-Noise Twitter ratio?  Follow More People my recommendation to all newbies is follow at least 200-250 people. 

This way, when that jerk Chris (@ckieff) from NJ talks about the PB&J sandwich he had at lunch you won’t care because that brilliant guy Brett (@brett) in New York is talking about something really interesting that you like.

It doesn’t matter what you consider Signal, maybe you like soap operas, preschoolers, and scrap booking, or maybe you like marketing, rocket science, and Battlestar Galactica.  It doesn’t matter what you think Noise is either.  Think of noise like the definition of a weed- it’s something that you don’t want in this place at this time.  Sometimes, a tweet is a weed, and sometimes it’s a flower.  When you have a lot to choose from it doesn’t matter if one or two aren’t that good because they don’t stick out.  But if you’ve only got 10 tweets and 1 or 2 are weeds then it matters.

Some days the last thing in the world I want to read about is some kid in England who died of cancer and left notes to her parents.  Other days, that is the most moving inspirational thing I could possibly imagine. Perhaps it’s the Haiku’s on Mediabistro’s Facebook about media that will inspire me today.  Perhaps it’s what my friends recommend as the best hotel in Stockholm or the best hotel in NYC.  But I found it all in my Twitter stream in a couple of minutes.

In my experience anyone can find 200 people that they would be interested to follow.  It doesn’t matter what you like you’ll find enough people covering any interest.  Search lists, use Twellow to find people in your industry.  If you’re looking local read this article on 9 ways to find twitter users in your town from Mashable.  Other ways to find people to follow on Twitter CNET lists the best Twitter search engines.  But if you’re not “Getting Twitter” it’s not because of anything in you, or the people that you follow, it’s most likely just because you’re not following enough of them yet. So give it a shot and try to follow 200 and see what happens.

Give my 1 Good Reason you’re not following me on Twitter.

Posted via email from ckieff’s posterous