{"id":321,"date":"2012-02-02T16:31:11","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T16:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyoteblog.posterous.com\/follow-on-twitter-or-facebook"},"modified":"2017-05-16T16:54:28","modified_gmt":"2017-05-16T23:54:28","slug":"follow-on-twitter-or-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2012\/02\/follow-on-twitter-or-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I won&#8217;t follow you on Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Twitter_logo_blue-e1466452140856.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-1936\" src=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Twitter_logo_blue-150x150.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>A few organizations and individuals have told me they aren&#8217;t happy that I don&#8217;t follow them on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\">Twitter<\/a> <em><strong>and<\/strong><\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\">Facebook<\/a> <strong><em>and<\/em><\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/plus.google.com\" target=\"_blank\">Google+<\/a>, <strong><em>and<\/em><\/strong>, in addition, that I don&#8217;t <em><strong>also<\/strong><\/em> subscribe to their email newsletters <em><strong>and<\/strong><\/em> subscribe to their blogs.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the deal: <strong>you have to earn my follow on Twitter<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>I follow you on Twitter if most of your posts are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>conversation starters<\/li>\n<li>provocative (make me think)<\/li>\n<li>elicit feedback<\/li>\n<li>directly, immediately relate to my work<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If, by contrast, I really like your organization, but your tweets are mostly positive, benign PR pieces like<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;We have a new catalog&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Our volunteers are hugable&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Our Executive Director is at such-and-such conference&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Our shop hours are changing for winter&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m probably going to follow you on Facebook rather than Twitter (if at all).<\/p>\n<p>In addition, if you post to Facebook and you gateway those posts to Twitter, I&#8217;m probably going to just follow you on Facebook as well, and not at all on Twitter, because it&#8217;s doubtful your message is something I need to read ASAP, and it&#8217;s probably too long for Twitter anyway (I really hate truncated Tweats that end with a link to a Facebook status).<\/p>\n<p>I check Twitter at least twice a day. To me, it&#8217;s a place for information exchange and debate, and for breaking news, for <em>you need to look at this NOW<\/em> messages. I&#8217;ve noticed that organizations, institutions and consultants that use Twitter with this in mind aren&#8217;t surprised when they get comments or questions via Twitter &#8211; they even seem to delight at such. By contrast, organizations that use it primarily as an announcement tool get immediately defensive when someone tries to engage them on Twitter &#8211; and it&#8217;s why I prefer to follow those organizations on Facebook.<\/p>\n<p>Same if most of your posts are &#8220;I&#8217;m at the airport&#8221; or &#8220;I&#8217;m at such-and-such conference.&#8221; It&#8217;s nice to know that, but it&#8217;s not that much of a priority, so I&#8217;ll follow you on Facebook instead.<\/p>\n<p>I check my professional account on Facebook about once a day. I scroll through the updates to get a general idea of what organizations are up to. Not much in term of exchanges or debates are going on over on Facebook among the organizations and institutions I follow &#8211; it&#8217;s more of a &#8220;hey, look how fabulous we are&#8221; or &#8220;hey, we need money!&#8221; place. That&#8217;s a shame &#8211; it could be so much more &#8211; but that&#8217;s how it&#8217;s shaking down among the organizations I follow on Facebook (and GooglePlus, for that matter). So I pour myself a second cup of coffee and slog through your Facebook status updates, rarely finding anything that makes me go &#8220;Wow.&#8221; Exceptions? There are a few &#8211; and I&#8217;ll highlight those on next week&#8217;s blogs.<\/p>\n<p>And I may choose to read your email newsletter instead of following you on Facebook or Google Plus or Twitter. Don&#8217;t be hurt. <strong>I like email newsletters.<\/strong> I like that long moment of single focus and well-written narrative that gives me a more detailed picture about your work than any Tweet or Facebook status update could allow. I do my best to make time to read all that I subscribe to. And as I still have more subscribers for my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/tech4impact.html\" target=\"_blank\">own email newsletter, Tech4Impact<\/a> than Twitter or Facebook followers, I appreciate the value of email newsletters.<\/p>\n<p>So, <strong>how should you follow me online?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/jcravens42\" target=\"_blank\">Follow me on Twitter<\/a> if you want lots of short updates from me regarding nonprofits \/ NGOs, volunteers \/ volunteering, humanitarian \/ development \/ aid, communications, tech4good, and empowering women &amp; girls (updates regarding national and state parks, and tourism as a development tool, are also showing up as well). Or if you want to engage, today, right now, about any of those topics, in a very public way.<\/li>\n<li>Follow me on<strong><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/Jayne-Cravens\/183121081642\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/u\/0\/103773400410723816229\/posts\" target=\"_blank\">Google+<\/a> if you want just 1-3 short updates from me a day, mostly only about what I&#8217;m doing: a new web page, a new blog, a conference where I&#8217;ll be speaking, etc. And, FYI, there&#8217;s nothing I post at Facebook or Google+ that I don&#8217;t also post on Twitter; I repeat probably only 25% of what I post to Twitter on Facebook and Google+. And, yes, I post exactly the same things to Facebook and Google+ &#8211; I&#8217;ve yet to see any reason to use them differently.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/tech4impact.html\" target=\"_blank\">Subscribe to my email newsletter<\/a> if you want to hear from me just once a month, or you want a once-a-month tech tip, in detail, especially for nonprofits, then subscribe to Tech4Impact. You will also get a list of all the blogs I&#8217;ve published in the last four weeks or so. I get the impression that each of my email subscribers also follow me on Facebook OR Google+ OR Twitter, but not all three.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s not how everyone uses social networking. But that&#8217;s how I&#8217;ve decided to use it. And it could change. In fact, it&#8217;s guaranteed that it WILL change, as social media changes.<\/p>\n<p>I would never expect anyone to follow me on on <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/jcravens42\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter<\/a> <strong><em>and<\/em><\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/Jayne-Cravens\/183121081642\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook<\/a> <strong><em>and<\/em><\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/u\/0\/103773400410723816229\/posts\" target=\"_blank\">Google+<\/a>, <strong><em> and<\/em><\/strong> to subscribe to my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/tech4impact.html\" target=\"_blank\">email newsletter<\/a>. Unless you were some freaky stalker. Please don&#8217;t be a freaky stalker. You probably don&#8217;t need to hear about a web page I&#8217;ve just updated four times in one morning.<\/p>\n<p>What about LinkedIn? Those connections are for my professional colleagues, PERIOD. Keeping it as a professional networking space has what kept it so valuable to me.<\/p>\n<p>Also see:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/coyoteblog.posterous.com\/its-okay-to-say-no-to-an-online-connection\">It&#8217;s okay to say &#8220;no&#8221; to an online connection<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/coyoteblog.posterous.com\/use-linkedin-for-nonprofits-yes-no\">LinkedIn for Nonprofits? The Good &amp; Bad<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/me\/jayneonline.shtml\">All of my online activities<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few organizations and individuals have told me they aren&#8217;t happy that I don&#8217;t follow them on Twitter and Facebook and Google+, and, in addition, that I don&#8217;t also subscribe to their email newsletters and subscribe to their blogs. Here&#8217;s the deal&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[4,64,97,98,115,176,195,199,217,262,283,299,300,10,9,334,502,503,504],"class_list":["post-321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-relationsoutreach","category-tech-tools","tag-blogging","tag-blogs","tag-communication","tag-communications","tag-conversation","tag-engagement","tag-facebook","tag-feedback","tag-google","tag-interaction","tag-linkedin","tag-messages","tag-messaging","tag-ngos","tag-nonprofits","tag-online","tag-tweeting","tag-tweets","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-5b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3148,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions\/3148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}