Ebert and the Art of Tweeting

You’ll probably not find a more successful Tweeter than @ebertchicago. ¬†If you mainly use Twitter for news (I do), his Tweets can occasionally be wastes of time – I’ve unfollowed him and then followed him again a few times. ¬†But if you use Twitter for something higher, something better than news, you might find his Tweets, and those he reTweets, to be a good use of the medium – they are observations, commentary, wit and wisdom — but the thing that sets his Tweets apart is that he isn’t doing it because he HAS to, but because he WANTS to. ¬†Ebert elaborated on his Twitter philosophy in a recent CNN interview:

Ebert: I don’t know. I just enjoy the hell out of it. I try to hold promotion of my own site down to around 5-10 percent of my Tweets. I use proper English instead of ChatSpell. I try to be clear. Some people’s Tweets are so densely compressed I can’t understand them.¬†@SarahPalinUSA can be incomprehensible, she uses so many abbreviations and acronyms.

Several months ago I started something called Tweeto. Last thing every night, I re-tweet three of my new followers. That way I’ve discovered a surprising number of gifted twits that I now follow.

Andy Ihnatko, the cyberguru, advised me: “Try to maintain a high ratio of signal to noise.” I never inform people that I’m awake, or going to bed, or hungry, stuff like that. I’ve had to unfollow some brilliant people because they weren’t making a Twitter effort. Of the most colossal wastes of time is tweeting airport itineraries, for example JFK-ORD-LAX. If that was coming from Air Force One, I still wouldn’t give a damn.