Twitter’s revolution blues

That’s the trouble with announcing a revolution. If you fall short of your lofty ideals, you’re left looking somewhat exposed.

And while Twitter didn’t explicitly proclaim the music service it launched last month to be revolutionary, it certainly sailed pretty close on its official blog:

Twitter’s ’2,000 following’ rule

I like to follow a lot of people on Twitter. It seems the best way to listen effectively, and of course helps with building up your own followers.

But the PMLiVE Twitter account @tmeek87 and I run has not been able to follow anyone new for a few months because of a Twitter rule that caps the number of accounts you can follow at 2,000 until you attract an unspecified number of followers.

It’s called ‘aggressive following‘ apparently, and not a good thing in Twitter’s eyes. 

LinkedIn loses access to the firehose

Now that Twitter has tightened up its partnership policy to provide a ‘consistent experience‘ has it inadvertently done users of LinkedIn a favour?

Duplicating content across multiple networks, in the same form is a little tiresome after a while and automatic posting of tweets to users’ LinkedIn profiles have amplified noise on the social network but do little to socialise it.

Certainly it has added the appearance of vibrancy to LinkedIn, and more so than the headlines on LinkedIn Today, but ultimately a social network is better served by being a distinct network in its own right and not one that’s a conduit for another’s content.

Breaking news reports and social media guidelines

Last year the BBC issued social media guidelines whose stand out message seemed to be “don’t do anything stupid”.

But the Corporation’s not unreasonable suggestion to news staff who use the likes of Twitter may have been only partially heard, and today the BBC published some “refreshed breaking news guidance”.

These singled out the microblogging network to emphasise that it should be the priority of correspondents, reporters and producers to send information first to their BBC colleagues.

Is your Twitter account really your own?

Twitter Follower Mosaic by Joe Lazarus (joelaz)

The blurred lines between ‘work’ and ‘home’ social media use once again hit the news this week after a US company sued an ex-employee for keeping the Twitter followers he attracted while working for it.

Having set up my own social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+) while working for my previous employer, I have more than an academic interest in cases of this kind.

Granted, only the Twitter account was actually set up in work time, and then – initially at least – only to familiarise myself with technology while running a company Twitter account. Nevertheless, I’ve used – and continue to use – each of those channels to promote my work, source stories, make contacts and follow a variety of interests.

Offline Twitter promotion that was hard to miss

Returning some books to my local library today I was surprised to see this hard-to-miss advert for their Twitter account.

The surprise was more from its direct, eye-level promotion, complete with the now obligatory QR code, than from the fact of the library being on Twitter.

Like many, many other institutions and businesses Epsom Library is using Twitter as an additional customer service tool – it’s just rare to see such effective off-line promotion of the online tool, and placing it at the self-service computers where you borrow or return books was a nice touch too.