We’re finally past the point where people have (largely) stopped arguing over whether Twitter is journalism, and we’re now Tweeting in big numbers. I’ve said for some time that Twitter is an excellent marketing tool, but that we can’t look at it strictly as a device for driving traffic. We can also learn a few more things about how people consume information — and even how we write.

Twitter forces us to use an extreme economy of writing. Now, we’re not about to switch to 140-character scripts, but we can think of script-writing in terms of Twitter in this respect: is every word necessary?

Writes Josh Catone at Mashable:

These limits can be seen as a burden, or they can force you to think creatively about your content. If you only have 140 characters to work with, for example, you have to work extra hard to pack as much information as you can into each tweet while maintaining a voice consistent with your brand’s other copy.

Right on. We have to ask ourselves: Does each word add to the understanding of the story? Have we chosen our words carefully? With Twitter, we have no choice. It’s an excellent cure for logorrhea.

Twitter reminds us that people talk about the news in real time. I strongly recommend visiting twitpipe to get a view of just how much conversation about news is happening. Twitter is not all about “what I had for lunch.” Go to twitpipe, enter a keyword from the news, and watch the river flow. What do we learn? That we need to be a part of this river. The continuous news model that we preach feeds this desire. Tweeters (and webbies in general) don’t wait for the whole story. As I watch twitpipe today, I see a blast of tweets about the various Apple announcements.

There’s another good reason to use twitpipe (or the many sites and programs that do similar things). We constantly wonder what people are talking about in our community. Enter some search terms and you’ll see whether your guess is on the mark. This is real-time eavesdropping.

Josh also points out that Twitter is an excellent case of the importance of knowing your audience. My tweets are aimed at the people I think are following me (mostly TV and tech types). I try to offer helpful links and advice, mixed with my own strange sense of humor. My feed would be unsuccessful if I were to post my favorite recipes. If I were a chef, on the other hand, that’s exactly what I’d do because my followers would expect that. Know your audience, and use your expertise.

My other takeaway from years of using Twitter is the importance of links. The most helpful tweets are those that both summarize a story and link to it. That way I have a choice. We don’t link out enough. We need to. TV news websites are designed to be “sticky,” but the web doesn’t care about “stickiness.” What matters is being the right place to start. People will opt in to your Twitter feed when they believe you’re a trusted source of continuous, multi-platform information.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 6:13 pm and is filed under MediaReinvent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.