“Drop a pebble, make a wave“ That’s what happened when Jeremiah posted (and twittered) about Twitter and how it can be used. It has become known as Twitter Tuesday, and I doubt if there is a person left on the service that hasn’t made new connections because of it! There is a really good post here explaining the whole thing, so I won’t re-write history…
But I just realized how amazing this little blast of inter-connectedness really was! So far today, I have doubled the number of people I am following and the number of people following me has also doubled since this morning (and I has the 233rd person to comment on Jeremiah’s post!). Also, I tweeted about the new facebook feature that is a phonebook with all your friends already in it…which then got Nick O’Neill interested, so he posted about it on his blog. (And I see Nick’s article about Twitter got linked in an update on Jeremiah’s original post!)
Anyhow, this site isn’t exactly a Top 100 domain on the internet, but I generate anywhere from 30-50 organic hits a day (I count organic as not linked from my facebook, myspace, twitter, etc). Well, because of this twitter-madness, I have also doubled my site traffic between Nick’s post, my rather inconsequential comment over on J’s site, and people linking through various twitter-related outlets! I’m far behind keeping my site up-to-date because of the madness which is finals+graduation, but I think it is incredible how much effect this has had just on my little microcosm of the social graph!
Well, Jeremiah, maybe this is the jolt which shakes up and explodes the twitter community!
Hey great observations!
it’s clear there’s a perfect storm happening here…but what’s next?
Hey Andrew,
It has been an amazing day hasn’t it? One question for you though: gven your above post, don’t you think the comment on “following people (you) will get value from” may have been a touch short-sighted? I look after digital strategy for my company, and it is safe to say I am the only one who gets it, but I still throw ideas out to the masses as that gives me a very quick indication of what will and won’t stick with the masses, but it has also meant that people who don’t even understand the tech have offered insights I would never have thought of; it happens not inspite of the lack of understanding but because of it, and I place an incredible amount of value on it.
Hey David, I think that you can definitely get value from people outside your industry/expertise/whatever but I don’t think you maximize your benefit by following as many people as you can on Twitter.
I, for instance, am a political science and sociology student with an emphasis on methodology and data compilation but my passion has become collegiate marketing and social media. Because of this, I follow people from all areas of expertise, but I don’t follow hundreds of them…I think this lets me build higher-quality relationships with those I am connected to. So because my connections are diversified, I get good feedback on ideas from people in unrelated fields, but I am also not overwhelmed with a constant flood of incoming social info that you get if you have a massive network.
I go for quality over quantity when it comes to social media. Scoble, for instance has about a billion people in his twitter network and I’m sure it is easy for him to glance at his constant updates and get a good feel for the current trends on the web (think Techmeme for the social graph) but I don’t think I can really process that level of information all the time and still maintain my sanity!