Blogs are great, everyone should have one, certainly every company, but most of all they hsould be using it… but blogs have a serious drawback, they’re reactive, not proactive, your user has to come to you for updates. Which unless you have something worthwhile reading, they won’t bother doing. But just in case you do say something worth listening to from time to time, they link to you via RSS, just in case. And that my friends is the really important part to make note of. Blogs in general are too wordy, internet users are scanners, they don’t have time to read all the blogs out there, let alone read your long winded blog, so many choices, so little time, there’s a lot of noise to sift through.
So in steps twitter, messages that are only 140 characters in length total. May seem pointless at first, but think about what I’ve just outlined above, the messages are short, to the point and it’s proactive, your visitors link to you, they receive every tweet you send out. If all you’re doing is saying, “making my self a nice cup of coffee” or “off to the gym to pump those weights” then people will eventually stop following you around, you’re just adding to the noise & they already have a lot of that in their busy lives. Say something worth listening to and they’re continue to follow, keep it short and they’re actually read it!