What makes a tweet retweetable? What kind of tweet inspires an @RACHELkoppes reply? What should I even be tweeting about anyway? Why would anyone actually care about what I have to say? According to a recent blog post on the Business Grow blog, it’s all about quality vs. quantity.
This shouldn’t be a surprise – in most aspects of life, quality surpasses quantity easily. I’d rather have one really delicious piece of cake from Sweet Life than eat a whole bag of Chips Ahoy. I’d rather invest in a pair of Frye’s newest riding boots (I die!) than have to replace the same knockoff pair I bought at Forever 21 multiple times.
But that’s just my opinion.
I know plenty of people that prefer quantity to quality. A lot of shirts that they only wear one time, a lot of friends that they don’t really trust (or like that much). People like this just prefer to have more and don’t really care about the staying power of all of those things. I’ve noticed that the mindset of less is, well, less, transfer onto something other than clothes and friends and desserts – to Twitter.
We all know that person, the one that you had to unfollow because of tweets popping up in your news feed every 5 minutes that read something like this:
“Going shopping with my sister!”
or
“The cutest squirrel just ran past my window!”
or even better…
“So bored right now.”
- Wow, me too. Give me something interesting to work with here, people!
So, if you find yourself suffering from the epidemic befalling many twitters I like to call “the oversharing syndrome,” Dr. Ben Hanna has some tips for you that I personally plan to take into account from now on when tweeting:
1. Tweet quality versus tweet quantity
2. The first words are critical
3. Quality tweets live four days
4. Optimal time between tweets.
You can read more about his study here.
When I first started using Twitter, one of friends gave me a great piece of advice that I try to remember when I’m trying to compose a quality enriched, life changing, totally mind blowing tweet (I may be a little overconfident in those dreams, I’m still trying to reach that epic tweeting level, okay?). Give your followers something that might improve their day. Help lead them to a great article, amazing artwork, a cultural event, even a sale that’s going on.
Obviously, everyone has a different idea of what is intriguing, but at least you will be giving them the option to find something deeper in a world that has the potential to be pretty shallow. I mean, all of us tweeters would rather have followers than friends!
So basically, a tweet that says “love my new boots!” is great (and I’m sure you do too – they just better not be the Frye ones that I have my eye on!) but it better not be the only thing you’re tweeting about.
Ciao,
Rachel
Ps. Here’s a hilarious video that Kelli Matthews shared with our J452 class:
