Comments on: Twitter – to RSS or not RSS?

By: Dan Slee

Dan Slee — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:53:51 +0000

No to auto tweets. No to RSS.

It’s meant to be social.

Unless it’s a special jobs or planning applications feed which can churn through dozens a week…

kthxbai

By: iamadonut

iamadonut — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:44:12 +0000

the tweet is, in some respects, the equivalent of the press release hook. in other words, the reader will decide whether or not to click the link based on the tweet.

but, our RSS feed lead with the headline, which is not quite the same as the hook.

i did think about getting the @ndevoncouncil team to write the headline with a view to making it a tweet/hook as well.

but, thinking this through (with props to @danslee/@walsallcouncil), tweets are part of a conversation. a headline or even a hook might not always be delivered in conversational form.

also, some of our news releases don’t really lend themselves to the medium. “No change to taxi driver licence policy” anyone?

conclusion: we’re going to go with hand tweeted news items for a trial period trying to make the message fit the medium. we’ll leave other automated tweets – consultations, jobs, weather and traffic – as is.

By: maidbloke

maidbloke — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:22:46 +0000

Good article and it made me think about the pros and cons of automatic tweeting.

One point I think you missed is about tweet timing. Human-typed tweets will normally be sent at “sensible” times of the day when audiences will be higher. However bots don’t think about that sort of thing.

A good example of this is http://twitter.com/RBWM which sends its “NEWS:” tweets just after midnight, presumably just after the press release embargo has expired. Note that this account also has humans tweeting too, so it fits the “bit of both” type of account.

By: Pez

Pez — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:54:55 +0000

I honestly had no idea there was active resistance to RSS feeds! I thought the main issue was technology. Crazy. @lbsuttonnews seem to do it right in terms of being open about the fact that it is a news feed, but just looking at the content makes me feel sleepy. It's about injecting a bit of 'zing' into your feed that makes people sit up and be aware of what the council is doing, rather than seeing a tweet in their stream and being instantly turned off.

By: Adrian Short

Adrian Short — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:46:03 +0000

I'm not a big fan of automated tweets but like everything, they have their place. Content is best written to fit the medium rather than re-purposed. This is an issue with content syndication in general and one of the reasons why some people/orgs are resistant to RSS feeds. They don't want people reading the content out of context and without the surrounding support material. All that said, my own council's automated headline retweeter @lbsuttonnews has got nearly 400 followers, which is quite respectable. Clearly they can tolerate recycled headlines, but with that level of readership a bit of time fitting the content to suit the medium would definitely be justified.

By: e

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:37:52 +0000

“If you can’t get across what you’re trying to say in 140 characters, then you’re not trying hard enough.” Blimey, what a remarkable statement. Have Twitter people never seen a novel? a newspaper article? a train timetable?

Point taken about only needing a summary, though.

By: Pez

Pez — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:29:14 +0000

That’s a fault of the communicator, not the medium. If you can’t get across what you’re trying to say in 140 characters, then you’re not trying hard enough.

Besides, the tweet is only to communicate what the story’s about, not the whole content.

By: e

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:26:46 +0000

“Plus the content gets cut short and can often not make sense.” That’s a flaw in Twitter, not in anything else. The 140-char limit does not permit effective communication of news — only throwaway contextless babble.

By: Pez

Pez — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:35:13 +0000

Oh yeah, I am by no means saying that I AM THE ARBITER OF ALL THAT IS RIGHT AND TRUE, but I think we’re all in agreement that 100% auto tweets is A Bad Thing.

Having said that, if I’d have had my time again, I definitely wouldn’t have any auto tweets in the @lichfield_dc stream at all.

However, people do seem to like them and find them useful, so, although it might not sit comfortably with me personally, the majority of our audience don’t seem to mind.

By: Greener Leith

Greener Leith — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:55:03 +0000

We tweet a mixture of auto-tweets and human ones. People don’t seem to mind! That’s the great thing about Twitter – it’s a very flexible tool. Providing your auto-tweets are on-topic for your audience it doesn’t seem to matter too much. However, honesty probably is the best policy in all things.