Twitter | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

When You Absolutely, Positively Need to Reach Someone Quickly

In the last week, I’ve needed to get in touch with a few people via email about a social media project. For a few of them, I was missing email addresses so needed to contact the participants first by some other means to ask them to send their email addresses.

For Contact #1, I knew we were connected on LinkedIn, so I decided to send him a message through that service on Friday, Dec. 30.

For the next three, I checked first to see whether they were following me on Twitter, and sent them direct tweets instead.

Finally, yesterday, after having not heard from #1, I sent a direct tweet.

Here is the table of my results:

I realize this isn’t a large enough sample to be statistically meaningful. I also realize that my LinkedIn message was sent on a Friday before a holiday weekend, so it probably wasn’t the fairest test. But I wasn’t exactly fair to Twitter, either. For participants 2-4, I sent the tweets in the mid-to-late evening, possibly after some had gone to bed (they were all an hour ahead of me in the Eastern time zone). Number 3 responded at 4 a.m. I sent a follow-up to Number 4 the next afternoon, and this time the response was less than 2 hours.

Still, these results do fit with what I perceive as my experience in the relative responsiveness of Twitter vs. LinkedIn.

I think it relates to the way most people interact with the platforms. I don’t have statistics to support this (if you have some, please put them in the comments), but it seems people tend to use LinkedIn through its Web site. When you send someone a message in LinkedIn, therefore, people see it when they visit the site, or possibly through an email notification.

On Twitter, people can get notifications of new messages in those ways, but also tend to use smart phone clients or get text message alerts. This makes it much more likely they will get the notice quickly, wherever they are.

I’m not hacking on LinkedIn; it obviously has capabilities Twitter doesn’t, and you need to use different tools depending on what you want to accomplish. For soliciting and organizing professional recommendations, for instance, LinkedIn is clearly superior.

I have the LinkedIn iPhone app (although I haven’t used it much) and it probably offers push notifications as the Twitter app does (again, I welcome confirmation in the comments). My point isn’t that people couldn’t respond as quickly on LinkedIn as they do on Twitter, it’s just that in my experience they don’t.

How about you?

When you need to reach someone quickly, and if you don’t have the old-school contact information such as email or cell phone (and yes, having grown up with a single land line and snail mail, I realize the irony of calling email and cell phone “old school”), what do you find is the best social platform to use?

Twitter 202: Selectively adding Tweets to LinkedIn

At our Mayo Clinic Social Media Residency, fellow faculty member Meredith Gould (who is a great humanitarian, by the way), shamed several of us for linking our Twitter profiles to LinkedIn, and for having Twitter updates automatically posted to our LinkedIn profiles.

I think that for many of us for whom Twitter is our “mother tongue” among social platforms, having Twitter updates posted to LinkedIn is a way to keep our profiles updated without visiting the site.

Meredith said it is more important that you keep your LinkedIn profile professional than it is to update it frequently, and that many tweets about personal matters will be detrimental to that goal. (And since she has more than 47,000 lifetime tweets, I can definitely see that in her case.)

Having resolved to comply with the Meredith Mandate, I went to LinkedIn this morning. As I reviewed my settings, though, I noted that there is another option, as I have captured in this screen shot:

By checking the middle box, I could limit the Twitter updates going to LinkedIn to those in which I included the #in or #li hashtags.

This seems like a good solution to me. If I think of LinkedIn while I am doing an update, I can just add one of those hashtags and the post would go to LinkedIn.

If I forget about LinkedIn and don’t include those hashtags, I am essentially following the Meredith Mandate.

What do you think? Is that a good solution?

WWMD?

Widgets for a New Project

I’m working on an interesting new project, and we want to include some Mayo Clinic-related widgets in the sidebar. Here’s an example of one for Twitter:

I look forward to sharing information on the project as we’re ready to roll it out. For now, this is just my way of showing colleagues how this widget would appear. Note that the dimensions of the widget can be changed.

Here’s where you go to create your own widget. This one looks for tweets mentioning “Mayo Clinic” OR mayoclinic.

Twitter 310: Custom URL Shortening Case Study

So you want to get a custom-shortened URL for your Tweets.

How do you do it?

This post builds upon Twitter 210, and provides the answer. By watching the video below and following along with the slide presentation, you will see step-by-step how I created the leeaase.me custom short domain, and how you can do something similar.

It’s not expensive (at least it doesn’t have to be), and you can do it in an hour or so.

So, grab a Slurpee or your other favorite beverage, hit play on the embedded video, and follow along.

Twitter 310: Custom URL Shortener Case Study

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

Was this helpful? If you use this to guide you in creating your own custom URL shortener, please leave a comment and let me know what short domain you used.

Or if you still have questions, let me know about that, too.

Please also check out my Christmas letter, which I tweeted with this link http://leeaase.me/fRxcCt

Twitter 210: Vanity URL Shortening

In Social Media 110, I highlighted 7 services for shrinking URLs as a way to pack more information into the 140 characters Twitter allows.

After all, if you can compress a 90-character URL into 20 characters or fewer when sharing a link, that leaves you more space to provide information on what people will see when they click the link. That serves you and your users in two ways:

You can be more colorful in your description, to encourage people to click, and
You can give enough info that they may not need to click right away, but can perhaps “favorite” the link for later viewing or for reference.

Any of those seven link-shortening options work well, and there are no doubt dozens more available.

I’m returning to the subject today with an option some of you might find helpful, particularly if you work for a large organization. But it isn’t necessary that you be with a big company. In fact, even a small (but global) university can do this, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot.

You may have noticed some different shortened URLs in your Twitter stream from time-to-time, following a format like:

These are, as you might have guessed, custom-shortened links for a YouTube video, a story in the New York Times and a program note on CSPAN.

Why would they do that?

I see two main reasons for this strategy:

Branding: With youtu.be, nyti.ms and cs.pn, these organizations are “getting their names out” with every tweet that uses a link from their domain. Instead of the link being http://bit.ly/giXAam and just looking like hundreds of millions of others, CSPAN’s version carries its network name. Likewise for YouTube and the Times.

User confidence: With a bit.ly or ow.ly or TinyURL.com link, you never really know what’s on the other end before you click it. Creating a custom-shortened link system with a domain that you control enables users to click your link without worrying whether a site that is NSFW is on the other end.

How did they do that?

That’s the topic of my next post, in which I will take you step-by-step through how I created this shortened link to my annual Christmas Letter:

http://leeaase.me/fRxcCt

Meanwhile, I have a closing question: Besides the two I mentioned…

Category: Twitter