140Char

While it was an honour to be asked to contribute to an article which appeared on Businessweek.com recently, I was a bit reluctant to post a link until an error had been corrected, but seeing as it still hasn’t happened, I thought I might as well clear up the confusion here.

The article in question is ‘Building a Better Twitter‘, and to clarify - although I am indeed Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media, and I may occasionally refer to some of the work I do for my day job involving microblogging, this blog is not owned by Bauer Media, or in any way endorsed by my employer - it’s something I do as a personal project in my spare time, and all views and opinions published are my own, and are not representative of my employer.

On a brighter note, Darren Rowse kindly commented on my last post - highlighting how much more responsive the blogging world in general is to monitoring what is going on and ensuring assuracy and dialogue!

And finally, while I continue to work out how 140char is going to continue to progress, I’m going to air a minor irritation I’ve encountered with some of my new followers - if you’re going to follow me, and you’ve got your Twitter updates protected, are you just looking for me to broadcast at you? Am I meant to guess whether to repripocate? Or wouldn’t it be helpful for you to maybe send me a message telling me who you are?…

There’s been some commotion over the fact Britney Spears (or at least the PR team with her), has a Twitter account to accompany a new blog-type site.

Aside from the fact it’s disapointing she isn’t texting entries herself, and I’m not entirely sure how many of the Twittersphere will respond (1720 followers at the time of writing, only 360 more than your good author!), it’s a sign of a growing move towards the mainstream for Twitter.

After all, I’ve been meaning to post that Twitter doesn’t need a single new member to be perfect for me with the memberships of legendary British wits John Cleese (7084 followers) and Stephen Fry (7400 followers)

Plus MC Hammer has established himself before Britney, with 6019 followers. And sci-fi fans will appreciate the presence of former Star Trek star Wil Wheaton (19504 followers).

Strangely the Twitter Fan Wiki lists Hammer, Wheaton, and anyone else within a ‘Minor Celebrities‘ list. Seems a bit harsh! Perhaps we might need to make room on 140char.com for a more updated list - particularly of those celebrities who are tweeting for themselves and making a great job of it (Looks like everyone except Britney then!)

I’m a big believer in trying out things you want to comment on. Especially if it could contribute to the hosting costs for 140char.com.

Therefore, you can now buy the background of my Twitter profile page for 7 days, for just $50 on Twittads, which I wrote about at length on ‘Is Twittads just a fad?’.

(For the record, I’m followed by 1245, and following 1254 - and just posted by 4071st update at the time of writing).

What I’m interested in is finding out whether anyone is willing to shell out $50 for anyone over the 1000 mark, or where exactly the price point evolves to, and I’m really interested in seeing which advertisers are signed up and using the service and what their method is for seeing a Return on Investment.

Will it convert me to thinking there’s a bright future for Twittad?

As fast as we’re twittering, new applications are appearing! Just last week I suggested to a friend we should work on a system for backing up Twitter information - this week there’s already a choice of two applications.

Tweetake will back up your Friends, Followers, Favourites, Your Tweets, or Everything from your Twitter account. It does warn that you’ll need to exit certain Twitter clients, like Tweetdeck. Within a minute or two, I had an Excel file with 19 days of my last Tweets, and a list of people with their name, id (number in which they joined Twitter), description, location, last status update, avatar location on Twitter’s servers, and whether their updates were protected. The only thing I couldn’t find was an indication of which ones were followers, and which ones were friends. So you really need to export your friends as a separate list.

It’s a nice quick system, but it relies on you regularly backing up your lists. One benefit is you can see how many people are on Twitter within your friends list - mine started with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone at 12 and 13, and went up to the highest number at 15,160,529, although there were about 20 people with strange id numbers.

Twittersafe, like Tweetake, requires you to sign in with your Twitter username and password. It takes a while to log in, and you’re presented with a red ‘Back Up’ button and a couple of sponsorship adverts. Click to Back Up and everything goes quiet for a while. There’s a blank bar, which I presume should be a status bar. And that seems to be about it.

There claims to be an option to download an Excel copy, and future features will possibly include one-click restoration of your followers, which might be handy. But unless someone else has more success, it’ll have to be Tweetake and manually re-adding people!

What I think is useful to know

I am a psychologist and I am mostly interested in why we use Twitter: what do we hope to achieve? But hope is a function of our ability to see a goal and road or pathway to the goal. So, I am also interested in how people use Twitter. A good set of numbers or metrics is always a good starting point for seeing what is possible and what is not.

Good reference site

I’ve discovered a blog that presents lots of numbers. A year old post on “types of Twitter users” is interesting.

The article begins with a 2×2 model beloved of management theorists. People with lots of followers and lots of updates are stars. People with lots of followers and few updates are influentials. People with lots of updates and few followers are bots. And finally, people who have few followers and few updates are lurkers. We all started there.

When I look at the scattergrams, I think this 2×2 is forced. It looks to me that there is a very strong correlation between activity and followers.

The more you talk, the more followers you have!

What does this mean for planning your usage?

Do you intend to get bigger and bigger? Do you have an intuitive sense of a good size for you?