If you’re a journalist found of live-tweeting breaking news, this post may sadden. Well, if you’re Canadian it might.
It seems Quebec courts do NOT appreciate this little bit of technology and have banned live-tweeting from courtrooms.
There’s a teeny tiny loophole though. Small enough to squeeze a few tweets through.
We're kicking off our upcoming June Social Media Marketing Boot Camp session with a special keynote presentation by Ella Chick (left), the digital producer at Anderson Cooper 360°. She'll discuss how the network uses social media for breaking news and leverages social media to draw attention to organizations and causes. Learn more about our program and register here.
A new survey has unveiled the ten most annoying types of social media status update, with users who endlessly write and boast about exercise or weight loss ranking as the biggest irritants across Twitter and Facebook.
Moreover, the study, undertaken by fitness e-commerce site Sweatband.com, discovered that more than half (52 percent) of UK social networkers had decreased the amount of time they spend on social media sites because of irksome updates from friends and family – and 38 percent had quit at least one social site altogether.
Unlike pets, relationships on Twitter can just be for Christmas. Or a weekend. Or even a couple of hours.
There’s not a single user on the network who counts everybody as a fan. There’s nobody even close to that. Lady Gaga, one of the biggest celebrities on the planet, has more than 30 million followers. That’s impressive, but it also means well over 100 million other Twitter users don’t care enough to be one of them.
One of the ironies of Twitter is that when you start out you have more time to give to the people in your network. Why? Because it’s smaller. But because it’s small, you get less engagement. Less questions. Less demands on your time.
As your following grows, and especially when you breach your tipping point, you get more engagement. More questions. More demands. Subsequently, you have less time to give.
You have to prioritise. But how? And with whom?
Twitter has long established itself as the ultimate platform for sharing and exchanging link content. For bloggers and brands, Twitter has surpassed Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Reddit, and is only rivaled by Facebook as the most effective and consistent way to build website traffic through social marketing.
Better still, by building an engaged and relevant community, marketers can continue to reap the benefits of that traffic on a daily basis. Almost by accident, Twitter provided us with a new and improved take on permissive marketing, which has allowed the network to leave other social sharing websites in its dust.
One of the most important habits everybody using Twitter needs to adopt as early as possible is the habit of consistency.
This is true for personal accounts and brands, and it comes in two flavours – consistency in the things that you say, and consistency in how often you say them.
In other words: who you are, and what (and how often) you tweet about it, should be a constant.
Let me ask you a question. On Twitter, which of these is more important to you: getting a reply from somebody, or having them follow you back?
Most people would go with the latter, but it’s fundamentally wrong. And here’s why. Twitter is an open, public network. The reply mechanism works just as well whether I’m following you, you’re following me, or neither of us are following each other. A reciprocal follow is just a +1. Nothing more. The follow doesn’t make a lick of difference to the quality of the relationship.
Indeed, a follow, in and of itself, is essentially worthless.
What does Eminem have in common with the Dalai Lama?
Answer: they both follow zero people on Twitter.
Nobody. Nada. Zilch. And they never have.
Twitter is an open, public network, which means that, because anyone can contact anybody else via the humble @mention (or reply), theoretically, and on paper etc etc, you don’t actually need to follow a single person to allow conversations to take place and the tweets to flow. And celebrities like Eminem, of course, get plenty of attention on Twitter.
But… surely everybody can find somebody they want to follow. Whose tweets they want to read. Who they, you know, like. So, from where I’m sitting, flat-out refusing to follow anyone at all, and clinging to that zero, comes down to one thing, and one thing only: good, old-fashioned arrogance.
So somebody unfollowed you, huh?
How about that. How dare they. The sheer audacity. What on earth can you do?
We all have our own reasons for why we choose to unfollow (or block) certain individuals on Twitter. It might be because you see them as a spammer, find them abusive or rude, or have had problems with them on another network. Or it could simply be – and this is true in the majority of cases – that the content of their Twitter timeline isn’t something that is interesting or relevant to your needs.
The key word here is your. It’s your Twitter. You shape it how you see fit, and that includes who you choose to follow, and who you choose to unfollow.
And the best part? This works both ways.
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