I saw a tweet last week in which the tweeter was asking “how am I doing, is there anything you would change?”
It turns out the tweeter is a barrister, and he has been tweeting decisions of legal cases for the last two years, or thereabouts, and was asking was there something else he should be doing, for example brief summaries or explanations of the decisions.
It struck me that this chap has spent the last two years doing what he naturally understood to be good work on Twitter in bringing legal decisions to the masses. And he would have naturally expected some payback as time went on.
I got the impression that it was now dawning on him that what he was doing was not working and he was trying to find out what change might bring better results.
That’s a natural reaction but my view is he needs to look more fundamentally at what he is doing and decide whether Twitter is the right platform for what he is doing.
I don’t believe it is, there are better ways of building your brand and building a following. Twitter has its uses, but they are pretty limited and only for a certain type of individual and content.
It can be exploited, to a certain extent, by riding on the wave of popular topics or big accounts. But even those ‘successes’ are short lived.
That guy was beginning to find that Twitter is not the best platform for what he is doing and wants to do.
It may be dawning on him that he needs to make a significant change to his strategy if he wants to get some significant value and return from his work. Twitter is not the place.