To get Twitter you gotta Tweet!

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Leveraging Learning

It's always tough to try to explain the value of Twitter to people who have never used it. "It's updates from people in 140 characters."

It's like describing this painting by Chuck Close by saying "it's got all these little blobs of color". True, but doesn't really capture the experience.

The value of the painting doesn't come from the individual blobs of color, which on their own are pretty uninteresting, but from the way they come together to form a portrait of a person. Similarly, a single Twitter update (aka tweet) with no context may be uninteresting, but if you see many tweets from someone you follow over several days you start to see a picture of a person emerge. You will never appreciate this by just dipping in and reading random tweets, but only by following some people for at least a few days.

But to really get Twitter, you can't just read what others have to say; you have to tweet yourself; you have to interact. Using Twitter as a read-only medium is like using the telephone as a listen-only medium. Do you get more value from passively listening on a conference call or when you're actively engaged in a conversation?

Robert J Moore recently posted some interesting statistical analysis of Twitter user behavior that supports this.

The likelihood that someone who tweets once will tweet again is just over 60%. But by the time they've hit their 10th update, they're very likely to continue. It seems that by that point they've had time to see the value for themselves.

So if you still don't understand the value of Twitter here's my recommendation: follow at least 10 people for 10 days and tweet at least 10 times.

(BTW, if you want to make me one of your 10 people, I'm at http://twitter.com/johnhathaway)

~ posted by John Hathaway on 6 Oct 09
tagged as: social learning, twitter

7 Responses so far. Add Your Own.

Ironic that you have inspired a lot of tweets about this post, but no comments?

Love the 10 people/10 day/10 tweet challenge, and agree that there is a barrier you have to break through (having only recently broken through myself) before it stars to click.

Besides actually tweeting, the other watershed moment for me was when you suggested that I use TweetDeck. Being able to organize tweets into categories and columns to dig through (or neglect) as I see fit, really helped distinguish the signal from the noise. I'm hooked. Look out.

posted by Beth Chmielowski
October 9th, 2009

Here's a tip: run a search for industry keywords, such as #training, #learning, #elearning, or if your in marketing: #marketing, #marcom, etc.

View the profiles of those people and follow them if they seem like professionals tweeting things they blog or otherwise post about the profession. They often follow you in return--if they do, DR them (direct message) with a personal thank you.

Retweet anything that you find useful, and use the hashtag (#) keywords of your profession if you want people to find you.

You can learn a lot from tweeters. This is what I learned from tweeting for 10 days...and 255 tweets later.