Infuse Your Twitter with a Past

A rule of thumb in human resource management is to consult with an employee who’s been working in a job for about six months if you want to understand what’s involved in the job. Employees much newer than that are still striving to get the tasks straight and spot the shortcuts. The old hands on the job do so much automatically that they’d have trouble accurately giving HR the right facts for a job analysis.
     I’ve been on Twitter for somewhat more than six months now, so I’m feeling qualified to analyze all of Twitterdom. That’s shameless overconfidence, but it’s completely okay, since shameless overconfidence is a given among Twitter users.
     There’s a shameless overconfidence among those who think that retail professionals using Twitter for business purposes want to know trivial details of other users’ daily lives. And that they want to get five or ten tweets telling them about it from different angles. Or worse yet, a bunch of messages with identical wording sent out over the period of a day or so.
     In tweets which do happen to be appropriately business-focused the impression of shameless overconfidence arises from the preference for very short messages. To make it more tempting for others to retweet your contribution to their Followers, you keep your original tweet brief. And extreme brevity tolerates no “Here’s an interesting idea, but please carefully evaluate how well it applies in your store” or “This advice works wonders sometimes, but in other cases, it could kill your current business.”
     Still, perhaps the major reason for undeserved overconfidence is that Twitter lacks a past. People generally start out looking at their most recent messages and then work back until they run out of interest. The longer the time that goes by after you send your message, the greater the probability it’s buried out of reach.
     In addition, the ecommerce brain treasures the latest information. Even if the recipient of your tweet makes it to the day-old message, there’s a fair chance they’ll consider it less valuable.
     Rather than retweet without adding value, I use the Reply function to add a comment and link to a past blog post. So it goes to all my Followers, like a retweet, I then place the originating Twitter user’s @ handle after, not before, my comment and link.
     I recommend this as a way to help useful retailing history retweet itself.

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