us (twitter together time mix)
(note the infinity tat and ties)
I realized that due to their infinite nature, I’d been thinking of Twitter streams as being timeless—but this is not the case. Time matters on Twitter. Not all of the same people who are on early in the morning are on late at night. There are waves of users—one after another the continents wake up, drink coffee, go to work, go out, eat dinner, drink coffee, etc…
This doesn’t mean that the members of a Twitter stream are bound by geography or time zones—all that matters is that they are “on” at the same Twitter stream time—regardless if it’s real world quitting time for one and breakfast time for another. For instance, I know it’s getting near lunch when my west coast peeps start popping up, still sweetly half-asleep. We communicate on Twitter together (as an us) in a shared time that hovers over and in-between “real life” schedules.
Despite the fun of stretching out a Twitter conversation over many hours and many days (I’ve had extremely spirited exchanges with peeps in Australia that occur with over 12 hour intervals in between responses) there are also certain advantages to coordinating your Twitter time with the Twitter time of someone else. For instance, you’re free to “@” reply any public account on Twitter—even a famous person—and the reply will be waiting for them, which they may or may not read. But if you send the @ shout when you’re both online at the same time then there’s the chance that person might actually see your tweet flash across the screen and feel moved to engage you in a “real time” back and forth.
As a group of people who discovered each other through their mutual following of someone else (or something else, in the case of a trending topic), a Twitter stream is strong if it has a far reach, meaning the content of its users keeps reaching new people. One of the ways this happens is if the stream has amplification activity going on at many different times. People are retweeting and replying to one another about the content of someone they both follow regardless of whether that person is even online.
For those who are using # signs and other microsyntax for the purposes of propaganda they would do well to chart the times of the day in which their stream is the strongest—and then work from there to get others to tweet during the off hours.
One thing I wouldn’t recommend is using software to auto-tweet your content in intervals spaced out through 24 hours. That’s because I don’t recommend any auto-tweet software or software that “automatically” increases your number of followers or anything like that. Twitter is about being there, whenever you can make it—live and direct, in Twitter time. It could be once a day or a thousand—at 3AM eternal or 24/7…whatever works for you.
If you Tweet what’s real, when it’s real, you’ll never go wrong.
