Earlier this week, I posted on my experience with Twitter, Part 1. That post was retweeted by Robert Scoble, the traffic came, got a bunch of new followers on Twitter (welcome folks), and a flurry of passionate comments on the post, including 3 comments from Guy Kawasaki. Today, I’ll post my experience with Twitter, Part 2 and here are Part 3 and Part 4.
A very basic observation I’ve discovered in my 40-something days on Twitter is this: my blog post frequency has gone down and my tweet frequency has gone up. In other words, I observe an inverse relationship between my blog post frequency and my tweet frequency such as below:
Implications
- My Twitter audience and my Blog audience are different; so, on one respect, one will benefit and the other will not.
- Conveying information and participating in a conversation is tough on Twitter — 140 characters is all one has and needing to convey more complex concepts or trying to make a point on so few characters might be difficult. Blogging is better for that and the conversation can be had in the comment section but, since Tweeting more can lead to less Blogging, then that is a clear implication of the inverse relationship between the two.
- Cash Money: if you make revenue from your blog and nothing on Twitter, then expect to lose traffic and cash money as you tweet more and blog less.
Either/Or?
As in most things, it’s not an either/or or dichotomous situation. One can reconcile their tweeting habits with their blogging habits. In fact, on shmula.com, my tweets are now integrated directly on my blog which, I’ve discovered, is helping like crazy on search engine optimization (SEO) and getting indexed by Google.
Plus, my tweets can be additional or complementary content on my blog. My tweet content provide a different type of content that is actually more human — more of my everyday life — rather informative content as is typically on my blog. This means, then, that my readers can see a different aspect of the person behind shmula.com, not just the geek, but the human who does everyday human, non-interesting stuff.
I haven’t yet taken the leap of integrating my tweets into my blog. Perhaps I’ll do so soon; I don’t have any strong arguments against it, I just haven’t seen the need/benefits yet. I’ll rethink that now… thanks for your post.
I still say G. Kawasaki runs a twitter bot.
How does twitter integration with the blog help Google indexing? Frequency of updates on the blog? Content relevance of twits to blog would be iffy. Seems like they would have algorithms to keep twitters off the radar. I’ll try it if it works though.
I like your Twittering page. Did you use a plugin? If so, which one?
@Joe – Yeah, the plugin I use is from Alex King; I don’t remember the name, but I just created a new page on shmula.com, then wrote in the php on the empty page and my tweets render. It works pretty well.
@Jon – I use Google SiteMaps and I can see which pages gets prioritized when googlebot indexes shmula.com; All pages were weighted equally, until I created the Twittering… page, and now that gets indexed hourly, while the rest of the site gets indexed daily: it has a higher weight than the other pages. My guess is that the content is fresh, new, and not duplicated anywhere else, so googlebot indexes that site with a higher priority.
What I have found is that we only have so much time to communicate, but that different types of communication interfaces engender different kinds of communication.
So when you notice that your tweets are more human – that’s due to the type of communication that twitter rewards.
When people say “blogging is dead”, they usually have to say it in a blog post because twitter won’t allow depth beyond 140 characters.
I appreciate how you are looking at the trade offs here – from personal ,business and information exchange perspectives. You packed a lot in just a few words.