Twitter Fatigue

May 31, 2009

Are you tired of tweeting?  I find a fatigue factor is setting in.  I have fewer than 200 people I’m following (carefully chosen) and their posts are just whizzing by.  It doesn’t help that Twitter has been moving at the speed of a pig stuck in mud when I try to catch up with them.

I also find – to my surprise and dismay – that some of the most famous social media gurus write really dull tweets.  Do I need to get a blow-by-blow account of who is winning the NBA semi-final?  If I am a rabid fan it’s likely that I’m actually watching the game on TV or following it online.

This brings up the point of why we Tweet.  Is it to pass the time of day by recounting your every meal and when you went to bed?  Or is there a more serious purpose of sharing information about social media and reporting breaking news about a new company product – or product recall.  I’m guilty myself of some pretty lame tweets. A good friend reported she had returned from the evening ballet performance and I one-upped her by saying I had already been to the afternoon performance.

As the King of Siam said in the musical “The King and I” — is a puzzlement.  Write to http://twitter.com/jepaladino if you’d like to express your thoughts, or add a comment below.

Why do you Tweet?

Related posts:

1. CEO as Chief Communications Officer
2. Companies Need to Trust Their Employees as Brand Advocates
3. The Shrinking Resume
4. Why the 10,000 hours of practice rule doesn’t apply to social media

Comments

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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