This piece was written by Megan Garber for The Atlantic

 

A study based on 43,000 responses to Tweets found precisely what people like and loathe about microblog posts.

 

Here are some of the findings:

 

**Twitter, as a communications platform, has evolved beyond nascent Twitter's charmingly mundane updates ("cleaning my apartment"; "hungry") and into something more crowd-conscious and curatorial.

 

**Though Twitter won't necessarily replace traditional news, it increasingly functions as a real-time newswire, disseminating and amplifying information gathered from the world and the web.

 

**At the same time, though, being social, it functions as a source of entertainment. Which means that we have increasingly high -- and increasingly normalized -- expectations for Twitter as both a place and a platform.

 

**We want it to enlighten us, but we also want it to amuse us.

In that context, tweets that are informative or funny -- or, ideally, informative and funny -- evoke the best responses.

 

 **Tweets that contain stale information, repeat conventional wisdom, offer uselessly de-contextual news, or extoll the virtues of the awesome salad I had for lunch today don't, ultimately, do much to justify themselves.

 

So: Do be useful. Do be novel. Do be compelling. Do not, under any circumstances, be boring.

 

This is what caught my attention:

 

****Contribute to the story: To keep people interested, add an opinion, a pertinent fact or otherwise add to the conversation before hitting "send" on a retweet.

 

Takeaway:

 

"The Twitter ecosystem values learning about new content," the study notes -- so new info, it seems, is new info, regardless of who provides it.  

 

**Sharing your own work conveys excitement about that work -- which means that self-promotion, rather than being a Twitter turn-off, can actually be an added value.

 

Curated by Jan Gordon covering " Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

 

Read full article here: [http://ht.ly/8OrS8]


Via janlgordon