Twitter: sometimes brevity means all meat

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Public domain photo of meat shopWe banter a lot in discussions about social media and the various applications of it. Twitter, for good or ill, has come to dominate a lot of people’s thinking about what social media is, despite it being only a small piece of the puzzle. That said, Twitter does a great job of encouraging brevity with a 140 character restriction per message. Sometimes this creates inscrutability or long streams of drivel broken into bite size chunks, but sometimes…

… just sometimes …

… it distills the essence of what you want. It becomes all meat, no fat, trimmed to perfection. It’s rare, but it happens. Here’s an example of just how good Twitter can be if people distill the essence of what they want out of the service.

Danny Sullivan, SEO extraordinaire, held a Q&A session via Twitter. He then logged everything to a single blog post.

This is knowledge distilled. You’ll get so much out of this one post (and corresponding links to more resources) than you’ll get from 99% of the search engine blogs out there or the endless blathering of self-proclaimed “social media gurus”. I picked up and learned things from Danny’s session summary that I didn’t know, and I consider myself reasonably well versed in SEO.

The lesson reinforced: be an expert in something, and use social media to deliver the goods (as opposed to being a “social media expert”). In this case, Twitter forced both questioners and Danny as the expert to go for the all-meat distillation of knowledge, and the end product is concentrated brain food.

This to me is the essence of great Twitter usage and I’d love to see much more of this.

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Comments

6 responses to “Twitter: sometimes brevity means all meat”

  1. We do this every week with something called #uchat. It's all about people sharing expertise about college admissions — getting in, paying for college, cool programs, etc. Twitter is great for that — get to the meat, tap into the experts. Less BS — there's no time.

  2. We do this every week with something called #uchat. It's all about people sharing expertise about college admissions — getting in, paying for college, cool programs, etc. Twitter is great for that — get to the meat, tap into the experts. Less BS — there's no time.

  3. Keep posts like this one coming, I just love visiting your blog, keep posts like this coming.

  4. I so agree Chris, not only the BBJ, but the Globe and probably the Herald as well have accepted these disruptive Fallon Ads. What are they thinking, really, both sides. I understand the need for revenue, but ruining your product for some revenue. I understand wanting to get your name out there, but what is Fallon's agency thinking. This is not what they mean by stickiness. This kind of advertising is a true loose-loose-loose situation

  5. I so agree Chris, not only the BBJ, but the Globe and probably the Herald as well have accepted these disruptive Fallon Ads. What are they thinking, really, both sides. I understand the need for revenue, but ruining your product for some revenue. I understand wanting to get your name out there, but what is Fallon's agency thinking. This is not what they mean by stickiness. This kind of advertising is a true loose-loose-loose situation

  6. I so agree Chris, not only the BBJ, but the Globe and probably the Herald as well have accepted these disruptive Fallon Ads. What are they thinking, really, both sides. I understand the need for revenue, but ruining your product for some revenue. I understand wanting to get your name out there, but what is Fallon's agency thinking. This is not what they mean by stickiness. This kind of advertising is a true loose-loose-loose situation

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