Twitter

For those that do this now, can I ask what your experience has been like?

I'm thinking of jumping in, and would like to know a little more about what to expect.

 

I still want to see how this twitter bullshit makes newspapers any money. I can see putting a link on there or something but to tweet all day ... how the fuck does that make my newspaper any money? It's just more bullshit for the reporter to do in addition to writing, blogging, filming.

 

For those of us who are looking to try and see if this will increase page views and traffic to our various ventures, could you take your rambling nihilism elsewhere?

 

As a freelancer, it's a great way to point out articles and do a little bit of self promotion. It's also a good way to network among peers, as they have a chance to regularly see your work as you see theirs.

 

Four months of tweeting my links and breaking news has done more for driving traffic to our Web site than anything I've done in the previous five years.

 

Twitter has been an invaluable resource for me. I'm amazed at the constant updates I get from, say, the baseball winter meetings, which I do not have the pleasure of covering. I get immediate updates on the status of players directly from clubs as well as writers. This morning I learned of surgery performed on a player and was able to turn that around as a blog entry. And, yes, I Tweet, and those Tweets are distributed throughout cyberspace, bringing attention to me and my paper. And my blogs are immediately directed to Twitter. It's all about exposure these days because we're certainly not getting it via hard copies.

 

No sooner did I write my last post than I got on a conference call. Within five minutes there were four Tweets about that call.

 

Thanks a lot to all of you, Moddy, bob, Eagle. The model you're suggesting providing links to stories is the way I was thinking of going. The other idea was to provide running score updates from local tournaments and the state playoffs when they come around.

 

We do it. Facebook helps out a lot too.