Effective Tweets

What make an effective tweet? Good question. I read an article on CNET that suggested it depends on the subject of the message. Topics such as 'Facebook hits 1 billion users' aren’t as interesting as 'a billion people go hungry daily; wish the world would paid as much attention to that as the numbers of Facebook users'.

The author of the article goes on to show how his second tweet (on hunger, paraphrased here, btw) gets retweeted and earns him a bump up on his Klout score.

I know from personal experience, the people I reach are more interested in my publishing exploits and my fore coming novel than just about anything I post in my blog, unless I post that I signed a publishing contract or that the novel is available for purchase.

So I decided to test the theory in the article and tweeted about the poverty rate in 2011. The Census Bureau released the figures for 2011 last month. But no one seemed to notice that (of course it is almost impossible to tell). And I think one reason for that is no one is really paying attention to my tweets.

I think the moral of the story here is that unless the “right” people see your tweet, post, or message and think it is important to pass along, it will languish in cyberspace along with terabytes of other content. And who are the “right” people?

I have no idea.