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?

Twitter: Broadcast, Engage, or Both?

Twitter seems to work best when used as an amplifier for messages, set to 'broadcast only' if you will. However, to get messages out and move people to action (or at least thought), one must have followers who will re-broadcast and propagate those messages. If not, one is shouting inside an empty room.

This would suggest that if one is not already famous (Peter Gabriel, Salman Rushdie, et al), one will have to build up credible connections (follows and followbacks) with people who have an interest in the ideas and topics about which one will post. This should be done with genuine engagement, however, not merely to accumulate a herd of meaningless, random connections.

However, having meaningful engagement through a froth of posts from those whom one follows is a challenge. I only follow 167 persons/organizations currently, and keeping up with the Twitter feed is like drinking from a fire hose. I cannot fathom what it would be like to have thousands of followers. Letting my imagination free, it makes sense to me that if I were mega-famous (Angelina Jolie), I could only pick an occasional tweet to respond to personally and any other responses would be performed by staff assistants. I served on a thought leader's Twitter chat once and a team of 12 people handled incoming questions with the leader answering only a select handful, some of those with messages I and others craft. This is a common practice for busy, important people who still try to have some level of engagement.

That is the nut of Twitter's paradox: accumulate enough followers to get your messages out, and you cannot effectively engage with your audience, at least not on your own. Limit your followers and follows to a focused group, and your message may not escape the cadre. It is possible that *if* you have the right follows/followers, they will be influential enough to perpetuate your messages.

For now, I have chosen to follow only two kinds of persons:

• People whose ideas/thinking interest me regardless of whether we share belief systems (keeps me intellectually honest and challenges me)
• People who have chosen to follow/support/engage with me despite a lack of common interests (this broadens my knowledge and expands my areas of interest)

I will drink from the firehouse until I figure out how to regulate it.