Are You Annoyed By Retweets?

You want a Rusty Trombone for her birthday?

 

No - my wife plays the sax.

And no - not the Steve Sax

 

I don't mind Rovell. A lot of tweets but mostly ones I find interesting. I also like that his photo links do not require some kind of registration to view.

Those who provide links that require registration are quickly banished.

 

Not involved in this area . . . but the gamblers LOVE prompt lineup postings.

 

I look forward to the lineups each day. Too bad I get it from 4 different Nats writers. But yeah. I got no problem with tweeting the lineups each day. Mainly, I'm anxious to see whether Espinosa is on there or not.

 

I confess that I am a serial retweeter. I am working very diligently to rein in the RTs, and post more original thoughts.

 

I don't mind retweets if they actually tell me something.

What gets on my nerves are banal retweets that have nothing to do with anything. I just got one from another writer who retweeted a coach saying how excited he is about his incoming recruiting class.

Wow! Really! No shit! I'm waiting for the tweet from a coach who conveys his angst about his shitty recruiting class is. I imagine my wait will be analogous to that of the knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Head coaches' Twitter feeds are among the most vapid of all feeds. (Assistant coaches can occasionally be interesting as they don't totally grasp the nature of Twitter and sometimes post juicy stuff)

A third of the head coaches think they're Knute Rockne/Steven Covey-on-Twitter incarnate, another third send out platitudes about their own athletes that are so enthusiastic it would make the North Korean media blush, and the other third think they work for the sports information department as they declare their love of the other sports teams they likely never show up to actually watch.

So to actually re-tweet a coach tweet? Just stop.

 

Here is a fine example of inane RT's

Peter King ‏ @SI_PeterKing
RT @MaryBethKing1: Proud to work here! RT @EdelmanPR: Congrats to Edelman clients and staff on being named 2012 Agency of Yr at #sabreawards

 

I never realized how religious Tom Crean was until I followed him on Twitter. Just a rat-a-tat of thanks and praise be to God all day long, every day.

 

The Tom DeLay of the Big Whatever . . .

 

One thing this thread should make abundantly clear is that what we use Twitter for and what a lot of our followers use Twitter for are different things. We're trying to get useful information for work, keep up with our beats, etc. A lot of the seemingly inane things coaches and players tweet are things readers absolutely want to hear, whereas we write it off as the same old standard shtick. Regardless of the news value, isn't there some value in relaying that information to them?

From a strictly selfish standpoint, sometimes I retweet some of that stuff simply to gain more followers. Of course every coach in the world is going to say they love their recruiting class, blah, blah, blah. Why not use that to my advantage in the long run by retweeting it, picking up a few extra followers?

Eventually the goal is to draw those followers to your content.

 

Also for the record - I don't care where you just became mayor of on 4square. Don't bother me with that shit.