Saturday, September 19, 2009

The BOOT's thoughts on Twitter, Blogging and Social media

Darren Cronian of the fantastic Travel Rants Blog has been working on the Travel BlogCamp idea for a number of years now. Just recently he launched a site to house all the content and advice he is collecting. He sent me a few interview questions covering my thoughts on blogging and social media. For the full text of our exchange you will need to visit the Travel BlogCamp site (when the post is live). In the meantime I wanted to share with you the answer relating to my thoughts on Twitter. Darren asked me whether I thought Twitter was having a negative impact on blogs – especially in the area of comments. Here is what I said in return
“I have not yet figured out twitter (anyone who tells you have is lying). But a couple of trends are clear. First - Twitter is a much more powerful a means of generating buzz about a story that email forwarding. If a post I do is a hit on twitter (ie gets RTed a lot) then the traffic I receive will be much greater than any "pre-twitter" story. Second - Twitter lets me participate and share in information around an event unlike anything else. The use of hashtags for sharing information and commentary around a conference or event (whether you are there or not) has added a new dimension for interaction (and site traffic generation). Third - If you use Twitter a lot then you blog less. It gives me a means for making very short pieces of commentary and distribute information that I used to translate into a longer blog post”
More of the interview here
Want to follow me on twitter then I am here. If you just want BOOT posts only on Twitter then here.

1 comment:

Michael Raybman said...

I agree with your thoughts, also I think twitter helps blogs by making it easy for readers to find the most interesting posts across the segment of the blogosphere without actually following hundreds of blogs.

Besides, I a blog has good content I think there is no way twitter can actually "hurt" it.