Tweetstormers Should Get a Blog

Posted on May 12, 2014

A post on BuzzFeed by Charlie Warzel warns of a problem known as Tweetstorm. A tweetstorm is a series of consecutive numbered tweets published rapidly from a single Twitter account. This type of use of Twitter can annoy one's Twitter followers. The BuzzFeed post shows an example of a tweetstorm published by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen that has at least 9 tweets in it.

Twitter has an easy mechanism for dealing with this if it annoys you. You can simply unfollow the person that is tweeting too much too frequently. Most Twitter users are going to see lots of unfollows if they try something like this numbered tweetstorm technique. Andreessen is obviously more likely to hang on to his followers than others because he's Marc Andreessen.

Those considering tweetstorms should reconsider and get a blog - something many people have already told tweetstormers. Robert Scoble also makes this suggestion:

"But this is a problem with Twitter. Twitter should have expanded its service to make longer posts possible. It hasn't. So instead of doing this, why doesn't Marc use a Medium post or a Google+ post or a Tumblr post or a blog post on Wordpress and then just post a link?"

Get a blog. Problem solved. There's no need for Twitter to enable longer entries. Tweets are short for a reason.