>Silence is golden on Twitter?
on December 2, 2009 at 9:14 am>Took a week off from Twitter on Thanksgiving. Just needed a rest. Social media done right (in my opinion) needs constant tweaking. Improve on what’s working, stop what’s not.
There, that was free! 😀
I found a Twitter app that would delete all the tweets in your profile timeline. It’s called TwitWipe. I don’t take Twitter as seriously as most, so if it blew up in my face, I was willing to start over. Well, since I tweeted about 16,000 tweets since I started my @andycrash account in mid March, I was wondering how long it would take the app to delete all those tweets. It stopped at around 3,000 tweets (you can monitor how many tweets are being wiped). When it stopped, I went to the Twitter web interface and saw a blank timeline. The Tweets count was still reading around 13K, but my profile timeline was blank.
Interesting. Ok. Twitter only lets you view or save 3K tweets in your profile timeline.
When I first started with Twitter, I would ‘star’ or favorite some of my own tweets so I could reference them later to repost in different dayparts (for a global audience that missed them ‘live’).
When I checked my ‘favorites’ section, it saved those tweets all the way back to May 28th! So my tweets are somewhere in the Twitter database, just no longer in my profile timeline.
Taking a week off, my Twitter grader score didn’t move much at all. Still number 2 in Appleton, and top 20 in the state. And my score has remainded at 99.9 for the last few months. I can NOT explain why my grader score hasn’t moved with no updates in 7 days.
I also subscribe to Tweetbeep.com, a free service that emails me updates based on my search parameters. One of the searches I get hourly updates for is “andycrash”… now THIS WAS THE MOST INTERESTING thing that I discovered about mentions in my seven day absence:
Many mentions with my user name WERE DELETED BY THE SENDER! By my math over 70% of mentions that were once in my @ reply section are no longer there. In the TweetBeep emails, you have an option to view, reply, or retweet right from the email (as long as you’re logged in to your twitter account)… and to my surprise, when I would try to view the original tweet, it was “page not found”. Dare I say, that about a third of those mentions were from ‘friends’ on Twitter I engage with on a fairly regular basis!
Also, when I’m tweeting ‘live’, I usually gain about 6 new friends a day. By that term, I mean Twitter users I follow back. Maybe 2 or 3 of ’em are bots that don’t interest me and I block.
HOWEVER, since I didn’t post ANYTHING for a full week, I gained about 20 new “friends” per day (ones I wanted to follow back).
My personal Twitter experiment results:
Twitter will only make available for viewing your last 3,000 Tweets. I personally see no reason to save (or display) more than 3,000 tweets, since, in my opinion, you’re only a good as “your current tweet”. Why does your status from three months ago matter to anyone? If you have a reason, please let me know.
If you tweet something you want to save for awhile to re-post later, you may want to ‘star’ or ‘favorite’ that tweet. I’m glad I did that.
There is no daily ‘method to the madness’ of improving your Twitter Grader score. I suppose it’s fun to keep up with for some sort of bragging rights somewhere. Not sure where yet. Any insights on that, please … let me know.
Twitter mentions and @ replies: Friends and Twitter users are deleting some of their “shout outs” or mentions in a housecleaning effort (I’m assuming) which makes sense. In some instances, I may do the same… remove those little ‘insider’ or ‘time sensitive’ replies and responses (usually a few days later) that may not add true substance to your profile timeline for new prospective followers. OR – perhaps, an attempt was made to provoke a ‘live’ response from me and since I was offline for a week, the ‘mentionor’ didn’t get that desired response, decided to delete the mention and move on.
Live vs. Auto-tweets vs. Absense: You’re only as good as your latest or ‘next’ tweet. I’m very aware of my last tweet when logging off. If I’m going to be unavailable for awhile and clicks on my profile, what’s the top tweet going to read? Apparantly when I shut up for awhile and let my last few tweets speak for me, I get more followers. That I cannot prove or explain. 😀
Let me say this again, and you can bank on it. “YOU’RE ONLY A COOL AS YOUR NEXT TWEET”. There. All free and worth every penny!
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>Be advised, any retweets (on the new Twitter system) will have to be 'undone' manually, TwitWipe will not remove those. Not sure why your wipe is taking so long… I was able to delete 3000 tweets in about a half hour. Thanks for the comments. Following you at: http://twitter.com/bizurke
>I'm trying Twit Wipe and it takes for freaking ever. I'm almost an hour into it and it's only got rid of 44 tweets. I could have deleted way more than that myself.
Anyway, I like the idea of wiping the slate clean. I've been mulling over deleting all of my tweets but you helped push me into it.
>Good stuff, Andy!I agree with all that you had to say. Thanks for sharing!
>Great post, Andy. Twitter is kind of like an old time stripper, isn't it? You keep thinking it will show you everything, but it's always just one glove at a time. Yesterday, I found out that when people use the Twitter RT function to RT me, I don't get notified in my mentions. I only found out by looking at my stats in retweet rank. They list ALL recent retweets there. What new things will we learn today about Twitter?