Twitter tips

Last week I created version 1.0 of Simon's Guide to Twitter, a short presentation for my colleagues at work, designed to evangelise Twitter, encourage an increase in their use of the service, and to provide some guidance for those getting started.

One of the slides contains a list of tips which I thought made a good starting point for the newbie.  Some I made up myself, and some I 'borrowed' or were shared with me after an initial request for contributions.

I thought it might be worth sharing here, and also using this opportunity to ask for your thoughts on what should be included.  If you're new to Twitter I'm keen to know whether you find these helpful and encouraging, and if you're a seasoned pro, I'd like to hear your thoughts on how this list can be refined.  The aim is to get the 'top tips' onto a single slide, so it's certainly not intended to become an exhaustive list.

Please have a read-through and share your thoughts in the comments.

• Have a theme you tweet predominantly about


• Mix professional and personal* tweets


• * not too personal :-)


• Ensure your bio describes you and what you’re about


• Try to tweet at least 2 or 3 times a day


• Reach-out by sending ‘@replies’ – aim to increase conversations as % of tweets


• Use your real name in either ‘username’ or ‘name’ - eg. My username is AvayaData, name is ‘Simon Tompson’


• Use a photo of yourself (nobody follows an egg)


• Alcohol and twitter do not mix


• Consider anything you tweet will be public in perpetuity


• Use a #hashtag to join a conversation about a specific topic


• Don’t feel obliged to follow people who follow you


• Use Twitter search to find people covering topics that interest you and who may be interested in you


• As the number of people you’re following grows, use Lists to categorise


• Beautiful 20 year-old women who follow you are 99.9% guaranteed to be spammers

Facebook experiment ends, but...

OK, so last month the experiment ended.  To be very honest, I didn't miss Facebook at all during the break, but did begin to miss interacting with a select few people who I know very well will probably never look at another social network.  Everything I wrote in my last post still applies - Facebook is still, in my view, not a very appealing or attractive social networking site, but there are a couple of reasons why I decided to re-activate my account.

First-up, I'm human.  A couple of good friends of mine gently nudged me with 'we're missing your updates on Facebook' comments, and when one of these came in a Christmas card I thought perhaps I should get back on there and begin sharing again.  It's not like it's going to kill me.....right?

Secondly, my interest in social media (especially for work) is growing fast and the reality is that if you're going to be interested in something, you need to be actually, you know, using it.  The ever-increasing ease of sharing and the ever-improving tools for doing so mean that a Facebook account is worth having, even if it's not your primary network.

Almost immediately after I de-activated, Facebook introduced a number of changes which sought to address some of the major criticisms, and also the much-discussed Timeline.  Having gone back in I'm still not sure I like the overall feel of the place.  It's a bit like being forced to use a Windows PC when you're a Mac guy (like myself).  Sure, it works, but it's really not that pleasant a place to be.

Last, but most importantly, I decided that if I was going to go back onto the site, I'd address my number one criticism from my last post - noise.  One of the things which made it such a huge time-sink previously before was feeling obligated to 'friend' every human being I'd ever so much as met since the day I was born.  I've had the good fortune to know a lot of cool people over the course of my lifetime, but I've come to the conclusion that life is an ever-evolving and changing process, and as part of that process people come into your life, and then at some point they go out of your life again.  It's no reflection on them whatsoever, but they're simply no longer part of my contemporary life, and it's safe to say that will be for a reason, assuming I wanted to analyse it.  The bottom line is that I don't much care to read all the trivial updates from their lives, or have them know mine.  That all seems rather pointless to me now.

So, I decided to purge all these 'friends' who are no longer in my present-day life and just use Facebook for family and the friends who I am still actively engaged with in some capacity.  For the most part I've also discarded people who were only 'friends' because I happen to work with them.  If I wouldn't go out of my way to go for a drink with them, then I'm unlikely to be too interested in whatever their baby barfed all over them that morning!

So, taking all those 'friends' out, and bearing in mind several of my friends aren't on any kind of social network at all, I'm left with around 30 people (compared to around 110 previously).  Much more manageable, and a fair bit more intimate too.  I like the fact I'm just talking to, and listening to, those people who I see from time to time in the real world.  It also means I won't have to think quite so broadly about all the people who will see what I post before I do so.

I'm still mostly tweeting and having those sent to Facebook, but I have started toying with other mobile apps which can post directly to Facebook, and of course I can now interact with posts which others put on there.  I'd still rather everyone were on Google+, but I suspect that's going to take a while, and with the average age of my friends/family may happen never!  You know what they say, you can't teach an old dog new tricks!

My Facebook Experiment

I've decided to take a break from Facebook. Whilst not quite ready to totally obliterate all my data and settings from the site, I've taken the step of 'deactivating' the account, which essentially just makes me vanish from the Facebook world.

So why? Why take this seemingly drastic step? Must admit, I do feel a bit like a counter-culture maverick, flying in the face of all contemporary logic, so I think it's only fair I set out my personal reasons for going down this route. My guess is that, as a minimum, you'll empathise with my reasoning, or perhaps you'll even agree with everything I say. I'm genuinely curious to hear your thoughts, so please add a comment below. OK, here goes :

Reassessing my definition of 'friendship'.  Just like everyone else, I have friends and I have family.  If I take a step back from Facebook and ask myself who are my friends, my list is going to be a subset of the 100-odd 'friends' I've accumulated on the site.  I'd say a third of the total, at most.

So what do I mean by a 'friend', or more to the point, what do I want the definition to be (remembering the old cliché that we choose our friends, unlike our family)? Well, for me, a friend is someone who I am still actively engaged with - ie. someone who I see, visit, call, text, email or IM on a regular or fairly regular basis.  They're the ones with whom I can pick up where I left off, no matter how much time has passed.  They're the ones who don't need a status update on Facebook to tell them what's going on in my life, and vice versa.  It's not that all the other people don't have some meaning for me, more that they are part of my past.  Why should I continue to engage with my past if I have no intention of actually seeing those people anywhere outside my computer screen?  So, my decision is partly based on a wish to focus on family and the friends I am actively engaging with in the present.

Too much Social Media noise.  I've been on a drive to simplify my life in 2011.  Somewhat challenging my efforts has been the explosion in hype around Social Media, forever encouraging me to sign-up and share.  It all gets a bit overwhelming.  I don't remember ever posting a status update on Facebook.  For a long time now I've been finding the brilliant simplicity of Twitter suits me far better, and so I simply instructed Twitter to send my tweets to Facebook as status updates, so I didn't have to do both.  Twitter wins because it's a fantastic networking tool and the 140 character limit (pure genius) ensures it is easily digestible.  I like it so much that I have two accounts - one personal, and one professional, and am constantly fed useful information about what interests me.  Compare and contrast this with Facebook status updates which I'm forced to receive from all my 'friends'.  De-friending, the equivalent of un-following on Twitter, is mired in all sorts of etiquette complexity, so it ends up being like family - the friends you didn't choose.  See where I'm going here?

The irony is that the first thing everyone pokes fun at Twitter for is the status updates where people describe what they had for lunch, but I'm more likely to see that kind of thing on my Facebook feed (wow, puns all over the place).  Tweeting what you had for lunch is Twitter for beginners.  If you use the service more constructively it's capable of so much more, and again, you choose who you follow with much greater freedom to stop following than you'll ever feel with a Facebook friend.

So that's Twitter.  Then there are the other social networks that serve a purpose for me.  LinkedIn has proved a simple yet powerful tool for collating the professional contacts I've made and continue to make.  It's also very handy for keeping an eye on what other employment opportunities are out there, should my current employer no longer tick all my career boxes.

And finally, there's the new kid on the block, Google+.  I fear in time it may end up much like Facebook has become, but right now it feels like a lighter option, and crucially, one which I feel properly in control of.  So when I want to post more than 140 characters, Google+, or indeed here on Wordpress, will be the place I turn.

Facebook is simply at the bottom of the pile.  Not without its uses, but the one that's easiest for me to drop.

Facebook Irritation.  Do I need to spell it out?  I think you know precisely what I'm talking about.  For as long as I can remember, there's been something or other irritating me about the site.  They change things - all the time!  I've become accustomed to rapid change in the internet age, but if it's confusing change which forces you to go and re-check your settings and wonder where things have gone, then it's change going backwards.  It perpetually feels like beta software.  Facebook always gives me this nasty feeling that something isn't set the way it should be, so I don't feel in control of what's on there about me and who is seeing it.  I don't feel I can trust the company with all that data.  18 months after the iPad launched there's STILL no proper client.  I don't know.  I'm rambling.  But Facebook has a way of making me feel like a mouse being continuously experimented on, a commodity.  Let's be honest, Facebook users ARE commodities for that profit-making business.

Facebook is NOT the Internet.  I'm old enough to have seen the whole genesis of the Internet, and experienced the thrill of the wild west, as I and others learned of the limitless potential of this network of networks.  To this day I am still regularly reminded how truly awesome the Internet is - possibly the greatest invention since the Gutenberg press.  What I love about it is that, in essence, it all boils down to a computer network running standards-based protocols which anyone can use as they see fit.  Now along comes this phenomenon called Facebook.  It aspires to somehow become  the Internet.  A portal beyond which you never need venture.  All your communication needs are covered, so why go to any other site?  As a child of www, I'm not at all happy to see advertisers using, for example, facebook.com/brandname, rather than www.brandname.com.  In essence, I don't want to see one huge corporation making the World Wide Web irrelevant.  The freedom of the Internet has led to strong competition and rapid innovation.  It's not difficult to guess what will happen to those benefits if one company subsumes all in its path.  No thank you.  I don't want to be part of that future.  The Internet is a public place with limitless potential, not a closed proprietary garden the great Zuckerberg designs for our 'benefit'.

Privacy.  I've left this one till last, though for many it would be their first issue with Facebook.  The truth is, I don't have that much to hide (at least that I'm aware of), and I'm not that bothered about people knowing me fully.  I guess I'm comfortable in my own skin.  The mere fact I'm happy to stay on other social networks should attest to that.  But let's assume I was more 'normal' and actually quite concerned about maintaining my privacy.  Well, this flies completely in the face of the whole Facebook ethos.  Zuckerberg wants us to share our entire lives online and sees no reason why any of us should hide anything.  Indeed, the site is about to launch Timelines, encouraging us to go back to our birthdate and fill in as much detail as possible about our lives.  By doing so, we would be simply feeding the Facebook machine with more and more ammunition to use for its financial gain - enabling more and more targeted advertising and more and more delicate social situations.  Just imagine!  Not for me, thanks.  It just doesn't sit well in my stomach.

OK, I've gone on long enough.  A lot of the things I don't like about Facebook can be ignored or overcome with a little effort, so it would be wrong to discourage others from using it if they're comfortable or enjoy doing so.  Hell, I may even return myself at some point, but for now I'm going to experiment with life outside, the way it was just 7 years ago, and see how it goes.  No doubt I'll miss some fun stuff.  No doubt I'll feel a bit of an outsider.  But for now, at least, it's time to take a break, and something tells me I'll survive just fine without it.  In the meantime, you can find my Twitter feed and Google+ details over on the right of this page.

Please share your thoughts and reactions - I'm interested to hear what you think.