There were two different posts on this topic that went around on Twitter this week (Do you Converse or Broadcast? How to Build (or Kill) Relationships on Twitter and When is Broadcasting OK on Twitter?). They are both dealing specifically with the issue I was talking about in this post about importing your eBay Listings to Twibler. I just wish I had used their words back then.
I know that some people really hate automatic (or broadcasting) Twitter feeds but I maintain that there is a place for them. I just want to stress that you should keep them separate from your main Twitter feed. By keeping your braodcast and conversation Twitter accounts seperate, you make sure to not update those that don’t like broadcast account while still making a broadcast account available for those that do use it.
An excellent example of this is Randy Smythe of MyBlogUtopia. Randy has his “conversational” account located at http://twitter.com/rksmythe but also has a Twitter Feed set-up for his blog at http://twitter.com/myblogutopia. Using the idea above, he converses on the rksmythe account but broadcasts on myblogutopia. In a similar way, I converse on http://twitter.com/HillaryDePiano but my company broadcasts at http://twitter.com/pricednostalgia.
This same idea can apply in many different ways. For instance, you can set up a Twitter Feed to automatically import your blog, your eBay items for sale, your podcast, or whatever you have going on. A great tool for this is TwitterFeed.
If your name is John Doe you could have your conversing account that is JohnDoe and then your broadcasting account that is JohnDoesBlog or JohnDoesEbayItemsForSale (that one’s probably too long, but you get the idea).
But why, you may ask, if the point of Twitter is networking, would you set up something that only broadcasts and doesn’t converse? The answer is simple. I am in my Twitter account far more than I am in my feed reader. It’s more convient to me to subscribe to my favorites sites on Twitter but, sadly, many of the sites I read are not on Twitter yet. Creating a broadcasting account for whatever you are promoting is just another way for your customers to subscribe to your stuff. Considering this requires no additional work on your part since TwitterFeed or Twibler will import your content automatically, there is no harm in setting it up and testing out the benefits.
