Twitter: Important? Urgent?
I had a thread on Twitter with some coworkers this morning about “etiquette” about when it is OK to not go back and read all Twitter activity. It’s a difficult shift in thinking that you should not read everything. The digital age has created way too much clutter for all of us. Many people are still having a hard time managing their email volume (one of my first blog posts was about unsubscribing from all email subscriptions from public websites an replacing with RSS/Feed Readers). One of my favorite business books of all times is the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Look at the Covey’s 4 quadrants below and tell me, where does Twitter activity go?
I think it depends on what you are doing and who you are following. Replies and direct messages to you might be important, but even though you can get lots of value out of Twitter, it’s very rare that anything on Twitter can be considered Urgent. Sure, you can often hear about things on Twitter sooner than you can through other websites or email, but that doesn’t mean that the timeliness translates into value. The really important things will usually be repeated by enough people that I’ll see it later on Twitter or FriendFeed; for many of the people that I want to watch closest, their best ideas end up in blog posts that I’ll read later.How do you not “miss” something important? My tips are 1) use a Twitter interface that allows you to separate those accounts that are most important to you (I use Tweetdeck, and I’m at the point that I’ve “let go” of trying to see every Tweet, even from my favorites), 2) setup Twitter search(es) for the keywords that are most important to you and 3) subscribe to the blogs of those people/companies that regularly publish information that you find valuable.I’ve run into many people who get overwhelmed or “don’t have time” for Twitter. Going back to Covey’s 4 quadrants, the way that we get more time is by working on Quadrant 2 activities which can reduce Quadrant 1 while we try and eliminate the distractions of Quadrant 3 and 4. Figure out the value that you get from Twitter and make it easy on yourself by not expecting that you can read the updates of everyone, or you will get burnt-out.
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Best Regards,
Stuart Miniman
Twitter @stu
