Seth Godin, in one of his talks at TED showed that little graph of Time and choices. Somewhat can be drawn out here too. To many tweets, too less time and i won't be wrong in saying this because People just don't have the ENOUGHT TIME for things. In this kind of situation what you can least do is, reply to what all is possible and ignore the rest.

Now, coming back to GOOD. GOOD means tweets worth replying. Not all tweets are, i am pretty sure about it.

Suppose I tweeted,

“I got this-this-this console from Best Buy today”

I get about ten replies.

About five tweets are simply congratulating me and telling me how good the thing is. While i have more 5 replies, asking me about how much it cost me, what accessories i got, and stuff like that.

Now you can clearly define those tweets into two groups. Closed loop one's and Open Loop one's. Closed loop tweets mostly mark ending a conversation like if someone told me how good the product is, i probably can't drag the conversation to longer and annoy the tweeter too with sluggish tweets. Open loop tweets were those which interrogated me, I probably have more substantial things to say to them. Also, in this kind of situation i lack time, probably I might reply to open loops only.

Prioritizing replies is the main task. You mentioned,

“Twitter, unlike instant messaging, does not have to be real time. You can respond an hour or a day later if you want, as long as you respond.”

You indeed are correct, but maybe if you take time out to reply to the tweets, maybe by then you could have even more tweets waiting to receive a response? What will you do then? 🙂

Thanks a lot for your response. I got your view point. Your definitely correct. Selectively replying to tweets doesn't mean that you neglect all but good. How i define Good tweets are one's which encourage me, or even spot some mistake or anything which affects and helps me. You can define Good the way you want. I will elaborate on it later as i write this.

Seth Godin, in one of his talks at TED showed that little graph of Time and choices. Somewhat can be drawn out here too. To many tweets, too less time and i won't be wrong in saying this because People just don't have the ENOUGHT TIME for things. In this kind of situation what you can least do is, reply to what all is possible and ignore the rest.

Now, coming back to GOOD. GOOD means tweets worth replying. Not all tweets are, i am pretty sure about it.

Suppose I tweeted,

“I got this-this-this console from Best Buy today”

I get about ten replies.

About five tweets are simply congratulating me and telling me how good the thing is. While i have more 5 replies, asking me about how much it cost me, what accessories i got, and stuff like that.

Now you can clearly define those tweets into two groups. Closed loop one's and Open Loop one's. Closed loop tweets mostly mark ending a conversation like if someone told me how good the product is, i probably can't drag the conversation to longer and annoy the tweeter too with sluggish tweets. Open loop tweets were those which interrogated me, I probably have more substantial things to say to them. Also, in this kind of situation i lack time, probably I might reply to open loops only.

Prioritizing replies is the main task. You mentioned,

“Twitter, unlike instant messaging, does not have to be real time. You can respond an hour or a day later if you want, as long as you respond.”

You indeed are correct, but maybe if you take time out to reply to the tweets, maybe by then you could have even more tweets waiting to receive a response? What will you do then? 🙂

Thanks very much Monik for taking the time to explain your viewpoint. Much appreciated. I think my real objection is the 'SELECTIVE REPLYING' which you seem to be advising people do on Twitter.

An analogy to illustrate my point. Imagine Twitter as a party you are attending. Taylor Swift and Conan O' Brien (examples of Twitter users who probably get thousands of @ replies a day) have been hired to perform. Both Taylor and Conan will probably get lots of attention when they perform and people will shout compliments at them when they finish performing. No one doing so will expect an individual response back. Indeed, neither Taylor nor Conan will respond back to any one individual comment. But people are okay with this 0% response rate because they didn't do so in expectation of a response anyway from a celebrity. Celebrities at movie premieres for example are taught not to respond to one fan without at least making an effort to appear to be reaching out to ALL fans because if they do they will open the floodgates to all the other fans wanting a response – potentially damaging their reputations in the eyes of those fans who didn't get a response.

Now you are mingling with the other regular people at the party after Taylor and Conan's performances and you are chatting to someone. In the course of your chat, a group of people overhear an interesting point you made about an event in that day's news, so they come over to say hello and add their thoughts on the point you have just made and you start talking to them. Then a few other people see you chatting away in your group and think to themselves that you look like a friendly and engaging person, let's go over and join the conversation. In your world, when these people come over to you, they will be ignored because 'too many people are replying to you' so you will only engage with an arbitrary 50% of people. In my world, knowing how rude it is to ignore anyone, I will find a way to engage with all 100% of them. If I'm running up against time, I will at least reply and suggest a method of continuing the discussion at a later date over coffee/e-mail etc.

The most egregious example on Twitter of SELECTIVE REPLYING I have ever seen is of a woman I followed (but who didn't follow back) who claimed to be a psychologist who used Twitter to, amongst other things, promote her blog which was full of articles about how to be happy, how to relieve stress and (somewhat ironically) how to make relationships work. I used to retweet some of her blog articles and even replied with questions which arose in reading her articles. As a result of my RT'ing, some of my followers followed her and RT'ed some of her blog articles too. Every morning she would thank people for RTs but curiously none of my followers nor I was ever once included in these thank yous. She also never replied to my @ replies even though her timeline showed she spent a fair few tweets @ replying to individuals. On further investigation, it appeared she only deemed the small number of people SHE FOLLOWED (who presumably followed her back) worthy of thanking for RTs and replying to. It seemed that she had made a conscious decision that her followers who she deemed unworthy of following back were to be completely ignored. She would have been better off setting her account up as a private account and just reject all new follower requests. Needless to say, in time I and my followers who were following her duly unfollowed her because the perception amongst her followers was that she had built a clique on Twitter and only wanted to operate within that clique to the exclusion of everyone else. So we just left her to it. However, if she had chosen not to thank anyone for RTs and not reply to anyone's questions, I suspect I might still be following her – I would have just learnt not to RT her (as she doesn't appreciate it from ANYONE) and not to reply to her (because she never replies to ANYONE). Instead she chose to exhibit a prejudice of sorts and while I'm sure this wasn't the case, taken to extremes people will impute all sorts of mean things from this – her avatar showed her to be white and blonde, was it because I was black and some of my followers had Jewish sounding names that meant she didn't engage us? I'm exaggerating for effect but you see where I'm going with this…

I don't really understand the whole 'annoyed with clogging up timelines with @ replies' or 'preventing other people from engaging with you' arguments. Only select people see @ replies (the @ person themselves and our mutual followers) and Twitter, unlike instant messaging, does not have to be real time. You can respond an hour or a day later if you want, as long as you respond.

Your point of view is correct. You must note, that if you get massive replies it's quite difficult. I am not sure about ethical approval of this but as per what we've observe, users do get annoyed with people continuously sending out “@” replies, because this blocks out the follower from engaging in conversation with you.

Next, it saves a lot of time. I know so many people who just cannot spend more than half an hour on twitter or stay live via Mobile devices. Replying to everyone surely becomes a pain. If you can reply to 100% of tweets, nothing like that. But if you can't make sure you can atleast reply to 50% too.

I still may have flaws in what I said above, and please tell me what do you think about it?

Thanks 🙂 More twitter lists coming up soon!

Anytime 🙂 Glad you liked it 😛

Yup, true! 😉