How not to use Twitter

First of all I am a big fan of Twitter and I love the fact of the easy communication but there are several examples of how you should not use Twitter. One of them is the Twitter Account of the Sziget Festival which you can find under twitter.com/sziget which I added before the Sziget Festival started cause I thought I might get some updates on acts performing on the Sziget Festival in Budapest. Well I was disappointed quite fast and by now I am not following the Sziget Festival on Twitter anymore. So here is why.

First of all Twitter lives from followers AND following other people. Have a look on the Sziget Festival account. Around 500 followers but following nobody. Well OK, some people / companies do that because they have no time to reed all the tweets. So there is already no communication and Twitter is a communication tool. Next thing you will see if you check out the tweets. “Sziget on Flickr >>> bla bla message here – link”. Thats about it. They simply took the Flickr RSS feed for the tag “sziget” and use a service that automatically posts all pictures that are uploaded on Flickr with the tag “Sziget” on Twitter. Nothing more, no own posts. The problem here is that Sziget means island in English named after the Hajógyári island in Budapest where it takes place. So what happens if you take a RSS feed which has a generic word? You get tweets with all images tagged as “sziget” including the ones which have nothing to do with the Sziget Festival in Budapest. How annoying is that?

Now automating your tweets is no problem I thing especially if you use it to create fake accounts which are great because whenever you need to you can tweet some ads or self promotion and even earn some cash with it. I have some of these accounts but a bit more creative than the Sziget account.

So here is some recommendation for the Sziget people on how to use the account automated in a bit less simple way. The main thing is that followers don’t just want to see images. They want to watch movies and read articles as well. So?

1. Take the RSS feed of a Youtube tag as well to tweet some videos in between.
2. Search in Google News for “Sziget Festival” (I think that’s unique not just like “Sziget”) take the RSS and post these news articles to read.
3. Go to Technorati, search for “Sziget Festival” and take that RSS feed to cover the blogosphere and tweet their articles.
4. Create an Google alert on “Sziget Festival” with “as it happens” and take that RSS feed to cover the rest of the net.

Yo will now have a quite good amount of Tweets on a daily basis which are not just false images but also videos, text, blogs and much more. Every once in a while you should of course tweet the one or other real thing written by your own. I set up a Twitter account about the Sziget Festival and did exactly the above mentioned steps plus some additional features which might even bring some money but that I will cover in another post some time later. So I would bet that I pass the real Sziget Festival Twitter account (if it is a real one) by the next Sziget Festival in 2010. And because I am setting up this account now I will add some more accounts with similar topics to save some time.

So once more for the makers of the Sziget Twitter account. Put a bit more effort in Twitter because it really is a great communication tool with great effects now and in future.