Last Friday I told you about a little Twitter experiment I wanted to try. I promised to use Twitter briefly, first thing in the morning and last thing before leaving the office. In the middle of the day I was going to send out scheduled tweets using a new feature on TweetDeck.
The aim of this experiment was to decrease the amount of time I spent on Twitter whilst maintaining (and entertaining) SMC followers. Here’s how it went.
Monday – day 1
As promised I opened TweetDeck first thing (as usual) but only kept it open for half an hour. As usual I sent a couple of tweets, searched a few ‘all friends’ columns to look for news or anything that needed a response and I set up two scheduled tweets without any problem.
The morning was really productive. After I closed TweetDeck I got to work and everything went well until lunch. I have to admit, I did sneak on in my lunch break. I only wanted to check my first scheduled tweet had published but I ended up sending a couple of DMs – work related but it’s still cheating. I even made sure they were DMs, not open tweets so people wouldn’t know I was using Twitter. Sad.
The afternoon was fine, with no complaints about my scheduled tweets.
Followers at the start of the day: 285
Followers at the end of the day: 286
Cheating: Once (a couple of DMs but they were to the same person and it was SMC business)
Tuesday – day 2:
It was all going well until I got an email from Pepper Crescent telling me they could no longer host our event on the 8th. Cue a stream of announcements on Twitter and frequent checking to look for responses.
#fail!
Followers at end of day 2: 288 (not a total #fail)
Cheating: Yep.
Wednesday – day 3
It started well with another brief foray into TweetDeck, arranging a scheduled tweet and then getting on with some real work. Problems arrived about lunch time when I realised that we desperately needed to decide on a new cafe date to avoid annoying our followers. When we picked a date we naturally had to tweet about it and a few DMs flew back and forth as well to get it organised. After the main flurry of announcements I found myself checking for RTs every few minutes. Pointless, sad but true.
The afternoon got worse. TweetDeck went down and I was forced to log in to Twitter under each of my accounts to tweet (work related tweets) and check for other communications. Using Twitter is SO frustrating when you want to check multiple accounts and search terms that ordinarily appear together in the same window. Massive fail but that’s TweetDeck’s fault – not mine!
Followers at end of day 3: 287 (I have no idea who I lost but lots of regulars are still talking to me).
Cheating: Yes – but it was essential!
Overall, the first half of this week has not been very successful. When TweetDeck is functioning and I don’t have any SMC disasters then the scheduled tweets and limited tweet time are OK. On Monday I did miss the spontaneity and contact level I was used to and I did cheat at lunch time even though it wasn’t essential. Perhaps it would take many weeks to get me settled in this new routine and at the moment I can’t even tell if that’s possible or even worthwhile!
I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime feel free to add comments along the lines of ‘I told you so’ and so on…