How to tell people to do Twitter?

wow-thing
I was amazed with Twitter pretty early,but especially here in germany, only few people reach out to new stuff on the internet and just try it out. Instead, they fear the new stuff could take over their life and in case of Twitter most people I heard say “I don’t wanna read what you had for dinner, thanks. And I don’t wanna waste all my day telling people irrelevant stuff.”

I bet if you use Twitter, you heard that too. In the 185 people I follow, not a single one tweets about food, and I seldomly see irrelevant tweets. But people not using Twitter just cannot get that. Therefore, we have to transport the experience into their world. The best analogy I could find was the following:

(Short version)

Understand Twitter as TV, and everyone can design 5 minutes of one channel every day. Either, you can use those 5 minutes to show the most impressive and interesting things you’ve seen, experienced or felt today – or you can talk about your breakfast, lunch and supper. And now guess which channels the other viewers will be watching.

(Extended version)

Not the “I had fish today” stuff – and if you don’t experience anthing worthwhile in your days, you should maybe not tweet too much, but you can still watch the other channels. And all the people out there do their TV channels in a different style, there are funny ones, newsstyle one, channels about one person (made by the person him-/herself) and lots of experts of a certain topic. For every topic, there are at least 100 people doing channels on it. Even for a topic that interests you. And using up 5 minutes of your day to get the best and most interesting experiences about everything that you care about is worth it.

(If they didn’t already drop you as lunatic and stopped listening to defend their life against the limitless possibilities)

Well, and this doesn’t even mention that you can connect to those experts, and you can keep up with friends and you can even directly message celebrities. You can have other people see what youre doing or what you’re inspired in or what music you like or which YouTube video is the really funny thing you laughed 10 minutes about. In the blink of an eye. And if you watch a channel that is boring, you can just switch it off. Oh, and you can install the twitter app on Facebook, so you don’t need to update Facebook anymore – it gets auto-updated.


Creative Commons License photo credit: x-ray delta one

, Posted Monday, November 8th, 2010 under Philosophy, Tipps.

2 comments

  1. Sebastian Bortz says:

    Hi Tim,

    i am one of the persons who still doesn´t understand how to use Twitter properly. But at least your article inspired me to give it another try.

    Greetings,
    Sebastian

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