What’s causing Twitter/X to jump with activity and engagement of late?
Jumping back on Twitter over the last week or two, I can say things are hopping (maybe they were before I came back) and the engagement and learning are at a very high level.
My take on why?
Business/legal social media with a lot of trappings and often driven by marketing professionals, directly or in conjunction with lawyers or c-level professionals, can get watered down. Even when done by the professional themselves, the copy, good or bad, is “content marketing.”
Not to slight LinkedIn posts, I publish a fair amount myself. But after a while, it all starts to feel like more of the same.
Twitter feels fresh and new from a tech and innovation subjects standpoint. To me, it feels like people, personally, are talking about the latest developments and technology and how it’s being applied. I’m learning.
Twitter is instantly engaging. Twitter is about sharing what you’ve read and offering your comments. People seeing you having mentioned them in your tweet chime in by replying, sharing or liking.
Immediate relaxed discussion ensues. To me I like meeting the people in the center of news and technology – and if appropriate look for mutual business development opportunities.
Others see your tweet in all sorts of ways and chime in or like it as well. Many start to follow you. Absent the formalities of the follow/connect/lengthy profiles of a professional club like LinkedIn (again not dissing it), the flow follows. Maybe à la over a pint in a pub we’re talking in a common world about things we find interesting.
Twitter more of a dressed down bent maybe attracting more of the tech world – building it and strategizing its use. A lot of company founders. The stuff to be used by people in the c-suite and customers to come. Kind of makes it fun for me – to be in the trenches. Having been a founder too long to remember, I can relate.
I’ll concede a lot of people left Twitter. I see a lot of friends whose Twitter trough ran dry years ago. I’d surmise they did so when Elon Musk bought the company and more so when he got involved in politics.
I stopped using Twitter much, drank the Kool-aide that things were over. But not choosing my social media by the politics and social habits of the owner, I jumped back on.
I wanted to see what it was like to set up my Feedly app and get structured chosen news driven by other than algorithms and begin to share what I saw as a way of learning and engaging. When my blog, alone, and LinkedIn, wasn’t enough to leverage my use of Feedly, Twitter it was.
I am seeing the same with people totally new to Twitter. They’re finding something that they didn’t find elsewhere. They seem to be enjoying the learning, sharing and engagement.
Twitter’s back.