Writing for the Web

Why you're not getting Twitter followers (and why you should care)

Via SocialMediaToday.com, Paul Sutton lists 10 Reasons You’re Not Getting Followers on Twitter. Excerpt:

Twitter thrives on the relationship between you and your followers. And yet many small businesses struggle to gain a following and end up abandoning their profiles due to fundamental errors in the way they manage them. 

This often boils down to a lack of understanding of Twitter as a social channel and an inability or unwillingness to invest the time to learn. But the secret to success is simple: put yourself in your followers’ shoes and consider what you’re adding to their lives. 

There are some common mistakes that I see again and again on Twitter, and encountering one or more of these on a profile significantly decreases the chances of me following and/or increases the chances of me unfollowing or blocking.

Twitter tells me I've tweeted over 8,000 times, but I'm still pretty hazy about it; it's just part of posting a blog item, especially on my blog H5N1. That's a kind of clipping service about infectious diseases and the politics of public health. For the last three months, I've mostly been covering Haiti's cholera outbreak, and I've found several overlapping Twitter communities doing the same thing. 

So I've found Twitter a pretty good source of news, and that's what drives me to follow one person rather than another. A good correspondent, tweeting on the ground in Haiti, will find me a loyal follower.

I assume (perhaps mistakenly) that my followers are also interested in infectious diseases and public-health politics, and are using me to get quick links to breaking news. So I don't feel obliged to follow most of my followers.

As for the "ideal Twitter profile" that Paul Sutton recommends in #6, I don't come anywhere near it. Sometimes I'll re-tweet, but I'd rather pick up a tweeted link, post a blog item about it, and then tweet to my own followers plus those following hashtags like #cholera and #haiti and #babydoc.

Following can have drawbacks. I follow a number of Canadian journalists who are a bit over-smitten with tweeting and re-tweeting. Some of them have thumbs of steel and post nonstop tweets to one another. (From this they make a living?) This obliges me to scroll past long giggle-parties to find something I can use. Yes, I can always unfollow, but then I might miss the occasional scrap of real political gossip.

I suspect that we're dealing with Twitter as we dealt with blogging circa 2002: A kind of neat tool for various forms of self-publishing, but with its best days yet to come. If you have thoughts on where Twitter might go from here, or how you're using it in your own webwriting, I'd love to hear about it.

The debate rages on: One space or two after a period?

Via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a lively debate on the radio program Q: Q's Great Spaces Debate. You can listen to the 17-minute discussion between Farhad Manjoo and engineer-blogger Tom Lee.

I well recall the moment in 1952 when, as a novice SF writer just starting to type my stories, a somewhat older reader told me "two spaces after a period." I followed that rule ever after, even after the advent of word processing. 

Then in 1995 I read The Mac is Not a Typewriter, which made a forceful case for one space. I henceforth taught my students to use just one space, and met resistance just about every semester. Now I'm safely retired, but the debate continues.

Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it

Via Slate, a polemic I wish I'd written: Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. And of all people, Julian Assange stands indicted of this error. Excerpt:

Here's a fellow who's been using computers since at least the mid-1980s, a guy whose globetrotting tech-wizardry has come to symbolize all that's revolutionary about the digital age. Yet when he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. 

Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. 

Oh, Assange is by no means alone. Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. 

You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) 

The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy). 

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. 

Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. 

When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know. 

Typographers, that's who.