Extracting a sentence from a larger article about Twitter and marketing, April Dunford writes:
I never post a blog post without tweeting about it a couple of times because frankly, if I cared enough to spend the time writing it down, I generally care enough to share it.
I wonder if she also thumbtacks a printout of each blog post on the bulletin boards of every coffeehouse in town. I wonder if she faxes a copy of that printout to every church and media organization, and calls all of her friends to click over and visit. I wonder if she creates a video and uploads it to YouTube after every blog post, too.
I am writing tongue-in-check here, but my sarcasm is not far from what Penelope Trunk opined two years ago about the importance of unmashing the mashable:
It’s clear to me that blogging is best for expressing big ideas. If you can’t convey new ideas on your blog, then you probably won’t get a lot of traffic. And most blogs that do well have a single theme and the audience can depend on the theme dictating the content of the blog. But Twitter is not good for fleshed-out ideas. I see people using Twitter for a lot of stuff, but not for fleshed-out ideas. And Flickr is good for expressing passion. Way better than, say, Twitter.
So it strikes me as really lame that we have such a wide range of media at our disposal yet people are using that range to convey the same aspect of themselves: the personal brand they are creating for social media.
To April’s credit, she is not an ignoramus by tweeting links to her blog posts because she is also interactive, replying to people.
But, wait. Hold on. April also links to her recent tweets in the sidebar of her blog, causing me to return to Penelope:
When I started doing Twitter, I put my Twitter feed on the sidebar of my blog. It seemed smart: more content means more traffic, and more traffic is good. But after two weeks of Twitter, I removed it. And then, when I was blogging about important topics like ditching Hebrew school as a career harbinger, commenters asked what happened to my Twitter feed.
Well, the Twitter feed is right here on Twitter. Just like my LinkedIn profile is on LinkedIn, and the potted plants I’ve collected on Facebook are on Facebook. Because mashing our social media together for the purpose of marketing one feed to another dilutes the value of social media. If you express yourself in the same way on a blog and on Twitter, then you don’t need both.
Thoughts?
About Ari Herzog
Can’t help but notice the irony that I came here because of a tweet by you, Ari…
Twitter is perfect for short-form chats about the bigger picture, and if it brings in new eyes to a blog, where’s the discord?
.-= From Danny Brown to you: 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook – Free Ebook =-.
Where’s the irony, Danny?
April’s tweet of her blog post: http://twitter.com/aprildunford/status/15417355919
Mine: http://twitter.com/ariherzog/status/15424452231
If I hadn’t “tagged” you, you wouldn’t have seen it as quickly.
Your post (unless I’m missing something blatantly obvious) is about April (and, I guess, others) using Twitter to try and offer conversation when a blog post does it so much better (per your references to Penelope).
Isn’t that exactly what you did?
.-= From Danny Brown to you: 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook – Free Ebook =-.
No, in this case, I did not. Let’s dissect my tweet in question:
Thanking @dannybrown for linking to @aprildunford’s thoughts at http://bit.ly/cHSrX0 inspiring me to create http://ariwriter.com/?p=4080
Had I written, Stop Diluting Social Media: http://ariwriter.com/?p=4080 then we’d agree.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one. If you follow me, you’ll know that the vast majority of the links I Tweet go to other people’s posts. I share things I think are interesting and sometimes that includes my own stuff. I’m sure that’s the same reason you post links to your blog on Twitter. There have been many, many blog posts about the death of the RSS feed and how a large number of people are using Twitter to share and discover blog posts. A lot has changed in the two years since that quote was written.
On the subject of displaying Twitter posts on the sidebar of the blog – I do it because I want to give people a flavour of what I Tweet about so that they can decide whether or not to follow me without having to click through to my Tweet stream. It’s not there to “mash” anything, it’s just a preview.
April
I don’t follow you today, not on Twitter nor on your blog nor if there’s some other place. But I’ll be taking another look at your blog. But why should it matter? I’m referring to a moment in time, and relating something you wrote to something someone else wrote. I don’t expect you to agree with me, so thanks for sharing you don’t.
As far as sharing links on Twitter, see my reply to Danny. Look at the structure of your tweet of your blog post vs the structure of mine. That’s my point; that’s essentially hitting the post submit button and a RSS headline being created simultaneously as a Twitter headline. I used to do that, but then stopped, preferring to be manual about it. Different audiences, after all.
The structure of your tweet for your post 2 days ago (plus you asked for people to RT, interesting), looks a lot like mine this morning. How are we doing things differently?
http://twitter.com/ariherzog/status/15280677390
btw I don’t use a tool to tweet posts – I do it manually (not that I think that makes a difference at all but since you bring it up..).
April
.-= From April to you: Twitter: Is Marketing Doing it Wrong? =-.
Touche.
…though, you admit you tweet blog posts of yours multiple times of a day. I don’t.
I’ve got a big readership in the UK, another big bunch on the East coast and then a third group in California. The CA folks don’t see something I Tweet at 6AM their time so often I Tweet posts again when it’s their time zone.
It’s pretty easy to tell if you are spamming your own followers – they simply don’t RT what you post and/or unfollow you. In my case, almost the same number of folks RT what I post in the afternoon (both my posts and others) even if I’ve already posted the same link in the morning. Again, if that was the only thing I ever Tweeted, that would be boring and spam. I don’t and that’s why people (not you of course, you just blog about me) follow me.
April
.-= From April Dunford to you: Twitter: Is Marketing Doing it Wrong? =-.
I’d like to continue this line of reasoning, if you’ll let me. I grasp your point of multiple tweeting the same line for different time zones, but do you echo the same Twitter updates and retweets or only updates relating to your blog?
Further, if I am in your timezone, I may not be looking at my Twitter stream at that moment in time or I may be following 5,000 users. I wouldn’t see such a tweet, right?
And the problem with that is..?
There are different audiences in different timezones. Multiple tweets are like different editions of newscasts – you catch the audience that’s watching at that time.
.-= From Danny Brown to you: 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook – Free Ebook =-.
Intriguing analogy, comparing a Twitter stream to a TV news broadcast. But that analogy fails because one’s stream is never repetitive and always ripe with new replies, new retweets, new updates, no?
I think each medium needs its own form (don’t spam the same message across multiple platforms), but I also think a blog/site is a person or entity’s home base, and using other channels to lead people to the home base is a good goal. Glad Penelope’s thing is working for her, but the only way I’ve ever hear of her is from other people’s posts on other channels. She’s doing well enough not to network, I guess, but most aren’t.
.-= From Adriel Hampton to you: Social Media: An Annotated Life =-.
It’s one thing to lead people to your home, but it’s something else to be impersonal about it. Thanks for sharing.
I think some blog posts deserve to be pinned up at every coffee house.
But seriously, I do retweet some of my posts more than once to give it a little more exposure. Cross posting can be good if you consider that one person might follow your blog through your tweets, and another through your LinkedIn profile, and another through StumbleUpon. If you’re following the same person everywhere though, it can look excessive.
.-= From Kristi@Blogging Tips to you: Fetching Friday – Resources, Guest Blogging Contest & Rocket Timelapse =-.
Do you pin your posts at the coffeehouse? Do you anyone who does?
I think that if, say, I wrote about coffee, and a coffee shop had a bulletin board, I might do that.
I have seen business cards for blogs in applicable places though – like a book blogger in Phoenix left one by the bulletin board in a Borders, and a vegan blogger left her cards in a local vegan restaurant.
.-= From Kristi@Blogging Tips to you: Fetching Friday – Resources, Guest Blogging Contest & Rocket Timelapse =-.
Yeah, I agree with most of the commentators above, and definitely agree with Kristi on this one.
I think I see what you’re (Ari) getting at: one doesn’t really want a Twitter account to be this mindless spam machine which screams “go read my blog” all the time. And there are a few Tweeters who do provide real value from their Twitter alone but are sometimes a bit over the top with self-promotion.
But that doesn’t mean blogs have some fixed purpose (big ideas? on a blog? Sometimes), or that even flickr or Twitter has a fixed purpose, and that these purposes are inviolable.
.-= From ashok to you: Comment on Cowboy Bebop, “Sympathy for the Devil,” Session 6 =-.
I just don’t get it. In what way does using one’s presence in a particular space to let people know you have a presence in another type of space dilute your social media? Does being myself dilute me?
I’m not trying to sell something either on Twitter or on my blog; maybe it’s the lack of focus (which would be criticized as a marketing failure) that makes me take this view.
For the very reasons you and Penelope cite–the ability to express myself at length on my blog vs. the pithiness of Twitter–people may want to connect in multiple types of networks to get the best of each.
On Twitter I tweet links and enter into highly constrained discussions on topics that interest me. I also interact with people on topics THEY choose when I choose to respond.
On my blog I write about topics that interest me and get into discussions in the comment space, where we all have far more room to discuss than we would in a tweet.
But if I never tweeted a link to my blog, the people who engage with me only on Twitter wouldn’t have the chance to experience the much more developed thoughts I have room for there.
I tweet things I’d never blog about, such as live coverage of some events that I wouldn’t blog about afterwards. Like April, I view the few tweets visible on my blog as a taste of what I’m like in real time and as a chance for someone to spot a link I tweet that will never otherwise show up on the blog.
I can see your point applying to people who mindlessly link all their accounts so they end up with a tweet coming from Facebook that says “Follow us on Twitter too!”. I was alarmed the other day to see that my Disqus settings were creating tweets automatically when I commented because I had logged in through Twitter; I want to control that and be selective.
But if I take the time to comment–as I’m doing here–and then want to tell my Twitter followers that I found a particular post not only worth reading but also worth responding to, I’m enriching–not diluting. If I went on to write a rebuttal post instead of one of my typically too-long comments, I would be extending the conversation.
Or do you not want me to tweet about this?
–barb
Be yourself wherever you want and whatever you want to say. But once you start to say the same things to the same people in multiple places, I question if you’re diluting the reasons those places exist.
Remove the web, Barb. Would you dress yourself in the same clothes if you attended church, a Happy Hour, and the beach? Or, wouldn’t your clothing differ — even if you went with the same people to each place?