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Guiding Your Audience With Twitter

I was a late-comer to the Twitter party. I signed up for an account early-on (user number 10,000 and change) but never really touched it until the past few months because I just didn’t see the value.

In the beginning everyone was using Twitter to post what they were having for breakfast, or how cute their dog was — typical LiveJournal type junk. That didn’t appeal to me so I left it alone.

Over time, and without me posting much at all, people started following me on Twitter even though I rarely updated. I slowly got a couple hundred followers, and before I knew it, I had an audience.

As soon as I saw that I had an audience, I decided I might as well give them something interesting to read, so I started posting.

What I post on Twitter may not be exactly what everyone else posts. I rarely post about where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, or with whom I’m hanging out. What I do post on Twitter are links to interesting things I’ve found plus a little bit of commentary about those links — like Delicious with 1-sentence descriptions. Here’s an example of what I like to post on Twitter:

Download “pinvoke” set of 1000 free icons: http://idek.net/hD …better than famfamfam I’d say. I’m gonna use these starting immediately!

The reason I posted that is because in my regular travels around the Interwebs I stumbled upon a link that I think my audience would appreciate, mainly because my Twitter audience is made up of designers and web people. My normal action is to link it up in a new Twitter post (a tweet if you like that word, which I don’t!) but instead of saying “Hey, check this out: ” which a lot of people do, I like to show some of my personality and enthusiasm in the few words I get before and after the link.

I use a URL shortening service called idek.net that’s run by my friend Adam (and I’m in the process of redesigning it, check the mockup) and not only does it shorten your URLs but it also gives you detailed click-through statistics on every link you create. By seeing how many people click on my links, what time they click, and how they re-tweet or re-link it, I can figure out what types of links my audience likes to see. This has been integral in knowing what will get people interested which gives me some insight into what links work best with my Twitter audience and which don’t. What works best? Practical design and web development articles that can be immediately applied to someone’s work. Tutorials, downloads, how-to articles, and new ideas that can be useful when building websites and software. I wouldn’t know any of this without using idek.net so if you want to know how your audience is responding to your links, I highly recommend it.