How should we use Twitter: Classification & their Impact on us

Today an interesting conversation (here, here & here too) with Asfaq led me to brood over one simple question. How should Twitter be used? Now simple it is but its implications are manifold. To pen down some of my thoughts on “How we Tweet?” led me to another sort of thinking, i.e. does our tweeting ways or techniques of posting those short, succinct, terse messages (tweets) impact the way we think/perceive ideas/notions or stuff like that? I believe they do. I’ll take this post into two ways. First, will try to understand broadly how all those zillion of tweets posted per day around the world can be classified into and then how are they can impact the way we think/perceive about various things around us.

Firstly, those terse messages which we all have coined as Tweets can be broadly classified as:

1. Question/Enquiry Tweet: This category of tweets fall majorly into What, Where, When, How and all the other statements which ends with a question mark. These kinds of tweets generally take advantage of the collaborative framework of Twitter.

2. Share Tweet: This type of tweets are classified as sharing information in the form of links (mostly short & terse url), events & news or anything & everything which a person feels can be shared. This is the bread & butter for those ever-hungry bloggers looking for some extra bit of attention into their blog through some visitors.

3. Me Tweets: This category of tweets, I feel is the most significant yet abhorred ones for many since it creates clutter or noise in Twitter. This type of Tweet talks only about specific ones like I’m sleeping, I’m drinking coffee/beer, my girlfriend/boyfriend left me blah blah blah. Come one, not too many people want to listen to you. For this, I remember one very apt line: “…If you want to be boring, talk yourself; if you want to be interesting, talk everything other than yourself…” But as I said, this type helped Twitter survive because they have given us space where we can voice our opinions & life par se. So lastly no complaints there at least.

Lastly, how can those terse messages impact our thinking/perception:

A small incident happened today in the morning while I was on twitter. Moksh Juneja posted a small tweet on Airtel = Vodafone goof up which caught Twitter’s attention big time and people started forming their own opinion about Airtel & Vodafone.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong but the point I want to make is that all the money spent by companies on the brand building and portraying images about themselves get slapped every now and then since consumers are no fool nowadays. Information and connectivity is dirt cheap if not free. So holding back is not the solution anymore. You (companies) can’t hold back conversations anymore and consumers will make an impression about you and in turn influence others too. So the questions remains what are you doing about it? Get into the new system or die watching it out!

P.S. I always take business examples since it’s an easy fix to keep score.

Read More Twitter Post:

• Video: Twitter Simplified
• Fail Whale
• Revenue Models for Twitter
• Swainism #2: Random Thoughts on Twitter, Networking & Life
• My first Twitter Meetup at Mumbai