Brilliant summary of today’s webinar! Kudos Mr. Zarrella and Mr. Phelps.

There are few things more irritating than people/accounts that are tweeting the same links two or three times every day. And changing the headline makes it even worse. In that case the reader is expecting new content, only to find out they’ve been duped in to clicking through to content that isn’t new at all.

We’ve got to get away from these incessant “blasting” techniques that are designed solely to amass followers and/or get noticed – it’s maddening and it only adds to the increasing avalanche of Social Media static. In fact it’s worse than mere static – it’s digital litter. And we’re getting tired of having to wade through all this trash.

Hear hear.

My personal favorite example of this is @ebertchicago. I’ve been a fan of his film criticism for years, and I happen to generally agree with his politics, too. (You may or may not; that isn’t the point.) At first I thought his Twitter feed was great, until I started realizing that he tends to post the same handful of things over, and over, and over. On any given day, he appears to have a shortlist of topics he wants to flog, and he’ll circle back to them again, and again, and again, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days or longer.

Ebert is obviously doing something right, as just under 400k people are subscribed to his account. But I’ve come to think that either these people aren’t really reading everything, but just skim (which this constant re-posting would work well for, of course). That or, more cynically, these people have a much larger appetite for repetition than I do.

This way of using Twitter has a role, I suppose. But personally, I have a hard time picturing being a long-term reader of anyone that uses the service this way. I know my unfollow-button trigger finger starts getting real itchy, real fast when I get the feeling that someone I’d otherwise be interested in reading is going to be doing this.

I listened to the webinar yesterday and thought there was a lot of good in it. But I couldn’t help thinking – I wonder how much his data is affected by people (I think he called them ‘blogerati’) who *schedule* tweets and blog updates to occur later than they are written? For example, he thinks 11 pm might seem a wise time to reach out to bloggers because they post in the early AM. And that its best to blog early in the morning to get bloggers to link to you. But do we really have any idea why they appear to be posting/linking in the early AM? Couldn’t this be skewed by scheduled posts?

tweet reasonably!

In what way is this a tragedy of the commons issue? Tragedy of the commons involves the effects of multiple people acting in their own self-interest resulting in damage to the community. If you’re referring to my littering analogy, I don’t think you can equate someone littering to acting in their self-interest. In this case we’re talking about selfish individual behavior unrelated to anyone else’s participation.

Repeat Tweeting is intended primarily to drive greater exposure and increase the base of followers. That’s it. It’s a customer acquisition tactic. Period. Arguing that it’s main purpose is anything other than that is just intellectually dishonest.

As you say yourself in your blog post: “Repeating Tweets is unpopular with readers”.

I wonder how much variability is being lost by analyzing all this data in large groups? I suspect there are many different audiences with various goals, each with their own characteristics of when and how they like to get information. For instance, it is clear from the comments here that there is a subset of Twitter users which feel strongly negative toward the practice of tweeting the same links two or three times a day. This subset could be quite large and influential, but that effect is swamped in the aggregate analysis.

There are two factors at play that have lead to your irritation at what many call a fair use of Twitter. First, you follow few people, as you said in another comment. When you’re only following a hundred people, and only a fraction of them are very active (statistically, that’s probably a safe assumption) then you’re simply not reading very many tweets at all and repeats stand out. The second thing is that you may (or may not, but it’s possible) be watching Twitter too closely. If you’re noticing that someone tweeted the same link twice in a day, that might be a sign you’re a little too active.

By way of comparison – I follow more than 500 people, most of them from the affiliate marketing industry, and they are very, very talkative. It’s rare I see repeats, but occasionally when someone is launching a new product or trying to drum up interest in a cause, I’ll see a little. I also only check Tweetdeck about three times a day, sometimes less. The odds are very much against seeing repeats with the number of people I follow and the amount of time I spend doing it.

Lastly – Twitter is little more than an attention-getting tool. To call it anything else is disingenuous. If someone wants to have private conversations with people who never, ever, try to get more followers or try to get you to go to their sites – even passively – they can jump on IM or find a chat room somewhere. Twitter is, by its very design, intended to connect as many people with as many other people as possible. You (the general “you”) don’t put a tweet out there hoping that nobody will follow you as a result. You might not care if you don’t get new followers by the hundreds, but if your follower count was zero, you wouldn’t bother using Twitter.

Just a thought. I could be wrong.

Hey Daniel, appreciate your perspective. I’m pretty sure I didn’t suggest that Twitter is an appropriate place to have private conversations – it’s not. I use it primarily as an RSS replacement and to follow those whose updates I’m sincerely interested in keeping up with. Maybe that makes me an outlier.

BTW, if anyone is following 500 people who are very, very talkative then although they may technically be following them, they’re not paying much attention to them. And that’s ok. The beauty of Twitter is that it lets each user define what value they want to extract from it.

And while I agree that “Twitter is, by its very design, intended to connect as many people with as many other people as possible”, posting of identical content multiple times per day is obviously a calculated attempt to attract new followers without regard to how it affects existing followers.

That’s my point. As long as there is currency/influence associated with # of followers we’re going to continue to see a lot of users do whatever they think is necessary to get more followers, no matter the tactics.

Useful stuff indeed!

The problem becomes that if you don’t repeat Tweet (I use a DejaView label) everyone else is doing it and to punch through the noise you have to do it too to a certain degree.

The big question that many marketing professionals are asking today is. Can Twitter will be effective as a prime time tool in mainstream marketing!!??..