Most people I know don’t like to user Twitter, thinking that the service consists mostly of tweets about what people are eating for dinner or what they’re watching on TV. While a sizable number of Twitter users do share such inane information, Twitter offers a valuable service for people of all types, especially for news junkies such as myself. But getting content off of Twitter is much different than POSTING content onto it. While a service such as Facebook offers a relatively simple user experience for posting status updates, photographs, notes and more, Twitter requires the user to use special characters such as @ and #. While a tweet can be composed without either of these characters in it, your tweet will not make it far and not end up in front of many eyeballs if the user doesn’t know how to use them.
Nick Bilton over at the New York Times Bits technology blog demonstrates it well:
On Friday evening I was in Los Angeles visiting my sister. We were at a restaurant, chatting away about life, when my sister ebulliently announced that she wanted to “Tweet about our meal.” She pulled out her iPhone, opened up the Twitter application and then proceeded to click around aimlessly trying to figure out how to send a new Twitter message. I quickly turned into a scientist in a lab and sat inquisitively watching her navigate Twitter. I didn’t offer any guidance, although she clearly needed it.
… And, like my family, she never really took to Twitter. When I asked her last year why she rarely Tweeted, she said, “Twitter is too confusing.”
… At dinner, I eventually explained that the button in the top right corner of the Twitter application is used to create a new message. Pressing it, my sister began writing, “I am loving my date night with my little brother…” and then she stopped.
“How do I include your name in the Tweet?” she asked me. “Is it the @ symbol, then a space, then your name?” I explained that the @ symbol couldn’t have a space, and that she had to write my Twitter username, not just my given name.
If you can’t fully convince those that are more technically adept than most, yet may not be computer programmers, you have a lot of explaining to do in order to gain more market share. Or improve the user experience so that you get more people tweeting what they had for dinner that night without having to add special characters.
You can read the entire article here.
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