Over the last couple of months, Twitter has grown in leaps and bounds. Even in South Africa, we have had quite a good growth of Tweeters joining the Twecosystem. (OK, excuse the Twit Jargon…Twecosystem ©Rafiq)
But there seems to be a growing trend amongst Tweeters worldwide not using the system as it was intended. People seem to be using it as a chat system to talk between each other. It can sometimes really get annoying when all you see is one worded irrelevant replies being posted.
Darren Prowse from Problogger has written a brilliant post about how to use Twitter and how to promote your blog using Twitter. I highly recommend this article, as it explains Twitter in great detail.
One of his suggestions to curb the noise generated in on Twitter is to use direct messages:
Learn to Use Direct Messages
“If your reply tweet ratio is out of balance in that you ‘reply’ too much a good way to combat the problem is to consider using direct messages. My own approach to this is that I almost always publicly ‘reply’ to something that someone has Tweeted the first time – but if the conversation continues I’ll take the conversation to ‘direct messages’ after the second or third reply unless I think the conversation has something of value to my wider following community.”
To use direct messaging on Twitter you need to do the following:
“d username message” eg. “d marcforrest great post :)”
I’m sure by using this method there will be far less noise in the Twecosystem, and lots more topical conversation