By Eric Sylvers
It’s not often that a piece of news manages to be equally shocking and worthy of a yawn. But then Twitter is not just any company, service, phenomenon.
Our shocker/ho-hummer comes compliments of The Telegraph, which reports on a new study carried out by three universities in the U.S. that found:
- 130
million useless tweets are sent every day (ho-hum, no surprise there)
- 70
million interesting tweets are sent ever day (shocking, you’ve got to be
kidding)
Based on the people I follow on Twitter, I’d have thought the ratio would have been closer to 1/8 interesting and 7/8 not, which leads me to think I think I need to do some pruning. But I digress.
Too many hashtags (#shock, #ho-hum), lame status updates (I’m cleaning my room and this is boring), and complaining tweets (why won’t my boss recognise that I deserve a raise) were all particularly hated, according to the research.
This shocking and ho-humming piece of news comes from research carried out by Carnegie Mellon, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The researchers asked 1,500 Twitter users to comment on more than 40,000 tweets from the 21,000 accounts they jointly followed. Complete findings are to be presented in Seattle this week at a computer science conference.
The most annoying tweets, according to the research as well as yours truly, are those between people carrying out a private conversation (@Boring thanks, I’ll look into that; @JustAsBoring great, let me know what you think). Facebook-esque status updates and check-ins with Foursquare and also particularly hated.
Okay so you’ve had a look at your tweets and realise the majority of your content is no doubt falling into that pile of annoying dribble. So what to do? Here are nine rules for making your tweets interesting from the study’s authors and as taken from The Telegraph:
1. Old
news is no news. Twitter is fast moving so
information gets stale quickly so don't repeat links that have already been
repeated several times.
2.
Contribute to a story rather than just comment
on it. Which means add your own opinion or a new fact or don't bother.
3. Keep it
short. Even 140 characters can be too long for
some people's rambling comments.
4. Limit
the syntax. Do not overuse hashtags, @mentions
and abbreviations.
5. Don't
tell everyone where you are all the time.
Twitter users particular hate Foursquare check-ins
6. Don't
just link to a blog or a photo without giving readers a reason why they should click on it.
7. Don't
whine. Negative sentiments and complaints were
disliked.
8. Be a
tease. If you want someone to go onto your
website, don't give away the whole story in a tweet but use it as a way of
hooking the reader.
9.
Celebrities - the tiniest detail of your daily
routine is not any more interesting because you are famous. People want your
professional insights, not to know what you like in a sandwich.
