Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

twitter users

Making Twitter Sticky

Day One Hundred TwelveThere are a lot of changes happening over at Twitter at the minute. They recently updated their Terms of Service and now they’re working on Project ReTweet, where sharing someone else’s tweet with your connections will be performed differently from the current user-generated method.

As is usual when wide-scale changes happen at a company (or, in this case, on a digital stream), there are both fans and dissenters to the new proposals. That’s normal. But what if Twitter could bypass the need for changes like the retweet one?

Twitter’s reasoning for the change is that it can be a confusing mess for new users, and it’s one of the reasons a lot of new users give up within the first month.

While that’s true, a lot of that comes down to the fact that Twitter itself doesn’t offer a great user guide for newcomers. A really simple FAQ or intro sheet emailed to new users would make all the difference, and then they could advise of user-created options, how they fit in and how best to use them.

This would help settle in new users and create something similar to the WordPress community, where you’d have the official tools as well as the community-created ones that existing users can help with. It’d help people settle in more quickly and get the sticky factor that Twitter needs (if reports that 40% of all new users quit after one month is accurate).

But why stop there? There are other areas that Twitter could help keep new and existing users stay happy.

Kill the Private Spam

This is a major problem for Twitter. We know there’s a chance our public streams will have some spam content. But I don’t recall signing up for private message spam from third-party platforms that I didn’t even register for. Pirate games and mafia clans are just two current examples. How can they get into my private message area when I’m not a user? Not good, Twitter.

Make the Suggested Users List Relevant

When you sign up for a new account, Twitter gives you a list of suggested users. The problem is, this list is usually filled with either celebrities or Twitter “power users”. These accounts can often be amongst the most active and busy as far as content goes – how can that be a good introduction when you’ve just joined? Instead, why not work with something like Twellow, ask a couple of simple questions and use these keywords to offer suggestions that actually make sense? So, people in your locality, industry, interest zones, etc, and ease new users into the system as opposed to scaring them off with hyper feeds to follow.

These are just some options that Twitter could take to make the experience better. They’re nothing major, yet they could possibly make a big difference (at least from a user-friendliness viewpoint).

How about you – how would you make Twitter more sticky?

Creative Commons License photo credit: Dustin Diaz

If Only Twitter Had an Interactive Status Bar

I’ll come right out and say it – I’m a huge fan of Twitter. I think it’s one of the simplest yet most effective networking tools anywhere in social media. Such a simple networking concept as well – 140 characters to have a conversation (Tweet) or recommend a blog, website, person, business or product. Yet like any popular application, Twitter has its downside as well.

This ranges from the people who follow you simply to spam you with pitches for their business or latest money-making venture, to the Twitter users for whom having the largest amount of followers is more important than the conversation.

This is a major no-no in my book – after all, social media is all about the conversation, whether it’s from a business or personal point of view. But there could be a solution…

I’m not a technical person by any stretch of the imagination, but I wonder how easy it would be for the Twitter programmers to make their status bar interactive? At the moment, it’s just the standard “What are you doing?” that greets all users. But what if it was tied into each Twitter user’s comments and updated accordingly?

You could the have an instant view of what that person is like on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best kind of user who gives as much as takes, and 1 being the George W. Bush of the Twitter world). Some of the messages could include:

  • Why would you ever follow me? This would be reserved for the users who Tweet incessantly every minute and all about their own product, blog or business. Conversation for them died with women getting the vote. Why would you follow them indeed?
  • Why won’t you love me? Perfect for Twitter users who are simply in it for bragging rights to their friends about how many people are following them. The only Tweet you see from them is the “Who wants to be number 10 / 20 / 30?” and so on.
  • Why 8/10 Whiskas cats prefer my Tweets. This would be for those Twitter users that embrace the true meaning of social media. They share, they advise, they interact, they converse – simply put, they socialize.

Of course, you could have an infinite amount of status bar messages. The Tweets that people sent out would have their own analytic measurement – using keywords, links and hash tags – and the status would change accordingly.

Like I said, I’m no technical whiz. But I’m sure either the guys at Twitter itself, or one of the numerous and highly talented application developers using Twitter, could come up with something. What about you – think it’d catch on?