First let me say, that I love Twitter and you can follow me here.
But Twitter has a down side. As the critical mass continues to increase, the noise gets louder and louder. Confused? I’ll explain.
When you start out at Twitter, you have a few followers who you hold conversations with. Then as you become more involved, you follow more and more people and they follow you back (well, sometimes — more on that later).
But the point is that as your “following” numbers increase it gets harder to hold those conversations. And the same holds true for your followers. At this writing (12/5/08), I have 600 people following me on Twitter — most of them small business owners — so I decided to ask a question focused on that audience.
And nobody answered my question.
So I wondered. Did anyone hear me? Which prompted me to ask this question.
And I got three responses.
Was it just the noise that fuzzed up my original question? Was it too boring? Is no one interested?
What do you think?
Update 8/25/11: I now have over 23K followers on twitter and the conversation has cranked up a bit, but not much. I would love to talk with you there. Just hit me up @deniseoberry
About Denise O'Berry
Denise,
I think that there may be many reason:
It’s Friday night, it’s December and things are starting up for the Christmas Holiday and just maybe no one was listening.
I know how you feel, twitter can be very superficial, wide not deep. But heck, it’s Twitter not rocket science!
Twitter to me is my idea of speed networking!
Try asking your question on a Monday Morning!
I’m not following posts as closely as I usually do. With the holidays so near, I’m not posting as much either. I have wondered if anyone reads my posts! I’m guessing others are fairly busy, like me.
Twitter has a FLOW (the amount of tweets on your twitter homes page) which increases with your followers, based on their tweeting rate. And it has NOISE (the amount of tweets in your home page you don’t find interesting) which tends to increase with followers but not necessarily at the same rate.
The more in sync you are with your followers, the less noise you’ll have, relative to flow. Your noise/flow ratio will be smaller.
But, if you follow people willy nilly with little regard for what they tweet about, then your noise/flow rate will be higher (even approaching 1.0 (or 100%).
At this stage of Twitter I think most people who have a lot of flow also have a lot of noise because they’re not too selective about who they follow. As we get more skilled at using Twitter and the filtering tools get better, our noise/flow ratio will decrease.
Example – Right now:
Typical twitter account: Noise/Flow ratio=80%
Advanced Twitter account: Noise/Flow ratio=60%
12 months from now:
Typical twitter account: Noise/Flow ratio=50%
Advanced twitter account: Noise/Flow ratio=10%
So,your flow could actually increase while your noise decreases, allowing you see the tweets that interest you. When this happens I think you’ll find more people responding to your questions.
Just my thoughts anyway. Have a good evening!
Denise
Dont be down-hearted. I did not even see it. Its Saturday down under.
Our accountancy practice is tightening its cash flow management. The GM has taken over responsibility for collections and out of the hands of partners.
Renegade debtors are being chiselled away at. We are trying to get productivity up and we are trying to get our overheads down by tucking in another small practice, the profits from which will fall straight to the bottom line.
Thanks everyone for taking the time to comment and offering your great advice. I thought the timing might be a bit off on the question. But I also realize the noise ratio is and will continue to be a big factor.