Greg Ferro - Work to Live

Follow @EtherealMind on Micro.blog.

Don't Do Crowdchat

I'm often invited to participate in Crowdchat sessions on twitter. The answer is always no. Here's why:

  1. I have found my followers complain about the pointless chatter that Crowdchat creates.
  2. 140 characters limitation makes Twitter a frustrating discussion platform.
  3. High levels of unfollowing when I do CrowdChat™ sessions
  4. I will unfollow people using Crowdchat because they clutter up my feed. If I don't like it, why would I participate.

What I Think Is Missed

The majority of people on twitter have low levels of engagement. They don't use it much and haven't taken the time to work out how it works. They are unlikely to see or interact with your content regardless of the content, they will tend to passive consumption and quit the app.

Lets leave discussions of demographics out of it (older people struggle often because they learned IRC, many people aren't used to being social and public etc etc)

The most important followers are those who are completely engaged with your account. They see most of your activity and engage with it. Those are the key people in the graph. Anything that drives them away from you is a death blow to your growth.

My view

In my view, Crowdchat (and other  noisy twitter activities) us  brand suicide and received as twitter spam by the very people who are most engaged with my content.

Simple rules for using twitter for marketing:

  1. Don't make tweets for the sake of it. If you have nothing to say, then say that.
  2. Be useful. Point to valuable content, be helpful, be useful.
  3. Be targeted. Keep your themes consistent or people won't pay attention.
  4. Start conversations don't have them. You can't communicate in 140 characters.
  5. Repeat tweets at long intervals is fine.
  6. Write well. Tweets should be written in advance and look for nuance, errors & misinterpretation.

Crowdchat is antithetical to this approach. Its spammy, noisy, unfocussed and basically shows that you hate the people who follow your account.