Twitter Engagement and Authenticity

A few days ago I wrote a blog about engagement with thought leaders who post Twitter. I also wrote about Twitter often seemingly being oriented toward broadcast-only.

I have a thought more about this and what I value first and foremost is authenticity. I want to see posts from and engage with persons and entities in near-real-time, not merely be placed at the nozzle end of a firehouse pouring out tweets and links.

I have begun slowly un-following people who spray large volumes of posts but do not engage other twitterers via the reply function. While there is nothing inherently wrong with being broadcast-only, if you are not sharing information that improves my understanding of areas that are complex or lie outside my knowledge base, why should I expend precious bandwidth on you?

Those who spew torrents of tweets without looking back are of no value to me. Those who are high-volume, interesting/horrifying/thought-provoking/infuriating tweeters but who also choose to engage and defend/explain/retract their tweets are the beating heart of Twitter. Think what you will of the analysis or politics of @TheStalwart (Joseph Weisenthal), he presents information and theories that challenge one to think. Equally important, he will respond to challenges, questions, and differing perspectives. He is authentic, and that is the sort of Twitterer I seek out. Others like @ericjackson and @reformedbroker who, like Weisenthal, are financial and market experts that have taken the time to help an economic novice like me understand concepts from the POV of an market insider that would otherwise be inaccessible to me. I'm more learned for the experience.

Further, I've not found any of the aforementioned trio pre-posting tweets. They appear, at least to me, to be investing the time to tweet real-time instead of resorting to HootSuite, TweetDeck, or similar to put up a lawn sprinkler of orphaned tweets. Again, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with pre-positioning tweets if all you want to do is push messages out. However, I believe that you are cheating yourself and your followers out of potentially enlightening engagement if the bulk of your tweets only serve your agenda of putting X in front of readers. You'll earn enough replies, RTs, Mts, and favorites to drive up your Klout (or similar), but it's an empty accomplishment.

It is authentic to tweet with people, not at them and engage as you do so. Otherwise how different from robo-calling is what you are doing?