Twitter, (de)socialised medium?

As EeKayOnline i have been working my way into Twitterland for a few weeks now and i must confess, it got me excited.
But Twitter being new to me, i found it hard to get a grip on how to use it. Where are the boundaries of this medium; what is being looked at as spam, annoyances or other asocial behaviour?

In order to make myself known to the do’s and don’t i decided to check out if a repetitive, pushy approach -which, via mail would most definitely lead to being marked as annoyance (or worse: Spammer) – would do me bad in Twitterland. I mean, i know that the message stack will not erase itself, but with the followers being under a 1000 persons this kind of checking out might be worth the try.

I decided to start a poll on twtpoll.com with the question “What would make you review an iPhone App”. Chances are good that you’ve seen this fly by if you’re an iPhone developer too. I started broadcasting my poll(http://twtpoll.com/hgv5o0), wondering what the type and amount of response would be like. Below are my findings on this little experiment..

Day one -28th of April

• Status: Created my poll today
• Approach: Sent the poll using twtpolls standard settings. After a time i sent out the message a couple of times again, this time using #channels
• Feedback: 1 vote

i don’t know why, but i thought it would be raining feedback from the skies. I had about 230 followers and i thought “at least a dozen of them would respond, being busy Twitterers and all”.. Wrong.

I think it’s because it isn’t a direct (person to person) medium that there was no response. No one feels (and should be) obligated to answer your questions.

Twitter is about voluntarily replying, and doing so with fun and interaction in mind. Not filling out boring polls or blattering boring stuff..

After a few days after start- 30th of April

• Status: Not much replies, changing of tactics today
• Approach: instead of just spamming the Twitterair and #-quoted channels (the few i knew of) i wanted to make things more interesting. I didn’t have much feedback (3 votes I believe), i wanted to stimulate people more using nice tweets to “lure” them into answering.
• Feedback: ~10 votes

I was happy to see, that the instant i changed simply tweeting the question along with the poll’s url into creating mind-tingling questions like “would you want hard cash or is a promo code enough to do a review? tell me at:[link here]” or “s it dirty old’ green mony, or just a favour? what would put you up to it? [link here]” got the poll some attention.
I like to think this (little) succes has to do with the fact that Twittering is to the web, what Headlines are to a newspaper. Stimulating sentences that make one want to know more. In Twitter’s case, more about the person behind it, and what else that person’s got to say (or said).

People don’t want boring lines of text, thay want everlasting phrases that make them laugh, triggered and stimulated. Be stimulating.

At the end of the poll – 5th of May

• Status: No world representative results, but a good feeling anyway
• Approach: Today, the poll comes to an end, and so does this little experiment. The last two days i used the Tweets i sent to promote my poll at some of the biggest #channels.. i found out that there’s a site called wefollow.com. You can subscribe yourself as following three channels. But it also is a good source of looking into what channels are available, and how many are following that channel. 
  I used this info to send my polls along to some most popular channels (although i checked that there was relevance between my poll question and the channel)
• Feedback:  just a few more

Thinks end with my poll being filled out with not much more than a dozen answers, but i liked the fact that i found out that there are popular channels, to which one could tweet. Using this source of information didn’t lead to a flood of answers to my poll though.
It DID lead to my followersban growing from ~220 to ~268 followers in about a day.Thats a 22% increase of my followers! The traffic to my site got a peak as well! I can only conclude from this, that although the poll didn’t make people push a button, the kind of tweeting i used made people interested in me. Niiiiiice..

But it’s not just all good news

After getting a reply of a Twitterer with whome i’ve interacted a few times, asking me to stop this poll advertising, i was happy to conclude that in fact even Twitterland has its borders. Don’t be of an annoyance and retweet the same thing over and over.
Although my followers increased, i also lost a few followers. Even followers who wished me best of luck with my new ideas etc.

I will never know how they think of this experiment (unless Twitterland makes them come back), and I can only hope i haven’t replaced interested followers with new ones that aren’t into my “personal interest group”.

If you want to repeat your statement, wrap it into new tweets and be creative, not repetitive.

Conclusion

This experiment is at it’s end. I will tweet my story and hope that many will ook into it and get something usefull out of its content. But i understand now, that if these words don’t reach far, thats okay too. I won’t put a blame on Twitter, since i now understand it’s nature more. I know that you either have to be very popular or very creative (which can make you very popular so there’s really just one game here ) in order to let  your words reach many people.

Most of all, I learned from all of this I need to think of WHAT i want to state. Then, before tweeting it, I need to think of HOW i’m going to tweet.
And that, dear reader, isn’t all that different from what we know from times before computers even existed; Verbal communication….

…and yes, Twitter IS a socialized medium

A nice resource link for information about twittering can be found here.

ps: hope i didn’t asocialize myself in this fine medium

ps2: the poll’s results:

twtpoll results