Why I’m not adding Twitter to my blog
Lots of people have added a feed of latest tweets to the sidebar of their site or blog and when I was planning my site I assumed I would do the same. But I’ve recently started to have second thoughts.Tweets on a website always look out of place, somehow. I think this is because they are out of context. The concise style of writing that works well on Twitter (140 characters maximum) only really makes sense when viewed within that medium – whether you monitor your Twitter account via the website or using a client application, such as Tweetdeck or Twhirl. They form part of the conversational flow and dialogue that is the most exciting feature of Twitter. When an individual’s tweets are wrenched out of their ‘home’ and displayed alongside unrelated content they appear disjointed and meaningless.
I write different content for different media: blog posts are more considered and take much longer to compose; tweets are often irreverent and fired off as a quick response to something that has caught my eye at that moment. So I’m going to keep the two separate. I’ll have a link to my Twitter account, so that people have a route to connect with me there, but I won’t reproduce my Twitter content here.
What’s your approach?
Hi James,
I have become a bit disillusioned with Twitter. It is impossible to follow thousands of people at one time, so I actually wonder what practical use it serves. I personally follow only a handful of people that I am really interested in.
As you say elsewhere, there is a lot of hype around this, mainly by internet marketing ‘gurus’ saying it’s the promised land. I’m not so sure.
I’m sure it has a very good use, but I’m yet to fully discover it.
Chris
Interestingly, I’ve followed the exact same path, but my change of heart was due to the fact that my use of Twitter has changed completely in the last couple of months. At the beginning, my use of it was purely professional: discussions on translation, exchange of links purely geared towards translation and freelancing, etc. However, as I got to “know” fellow twitterers and as more and more of my friends joined the platform, I’ve found myself veering off-subject a lot of the time and using Twitter to connect with people on a more personal basis. As a result, my tweets no longer have a place on my blog, which is still 100% geared towards a professional audience. The personal nature of a lot of my tweets would clash with the professional tone of my website.