RSS subscribers vs Twitter followers? Where is the real value?
Are your Twitter followers of any value to you? Can you get them to take action or respond to questions? What happened to blog subscribers being the end-all, be-all yardstick of “voice”? I’ve been thinking about this topic a bunch lately, and recently came across a good post on GigaOm that talks about this very topic.
There are some useful points in the GigaOm article. Namely that blog subscribers are more valuable in general because of the intent and level of effort required to subscribe and the conscious decision it represents. Subscribing to blogs is pretty easy for most, but it does indeed take more thought than the single-click “follow” event that happens millions of times a day on Twitter.
Of particular relevance to us at Filtrbox was a point made about “deficient continuity”. Here’s the issue;
If you are not watching your twitter stream every second of the day, or spending quality time every day scanning your profile page to see what your followers said earlier in the day, you are missing the conversation and missing the posts/links/stories/opinions you care about. You miss everything you don’t watch. Filtrbox solves this problem because the monitoring is persistent, but that’s another post…
This may be part of the problem - if you don’t see the tweet, how can you possibly engage and respond? With a blog post, it comes to you when you are on the task of reading or consuming news. Its either in your inbox, in an RSS reader, or you have hit a portal page with your feeds on them. Does this make you more likely to respond?
Taking a look at our own blog, our subscribers were growing at a much slower rate than Twitter followers. I also have noticed that we don’t get as many comments or responses to blog posts. (Granted - we’ve not done a great job of updating this blog with good, fresh content) The questions I started pondering were:
- Has the conversation totally moved to Twitter?
- Has information overload finally saturated our readers?
- Is the audience/community/group of readers of a different profile?
- Do we have to work harder to convince people to subscribe to the blog? Is it more work to consume the content?
Something else I’ve noticed is that just like more traditional news stories, time of day and day of week matter on Twitter. In fact, I’d suspect the “deficient continuity” problem is quite a bit worse, and the attention/responses you’ll get evenings, weekends, etc is vastly different than, say, Tuesday morning.
What do you think? Are your Twitter followers more valuable than your blog subscribers?
Tags: blogs, RSS, social media, Twitter
