Split twitter personality

By admin on 09/04/2012

A few months ago I decided to step back off Twitter a bit and focus on blogging more. This has worked and I've increased the amount I've been blogging significantly. I find writing has gotten easier as a result and the traffic to my site has increased also.

However, without impacting my blog momentum I've decided to embrace "social media" a bit more, both personally and for my company Moov2. This is something I'll be sharing more thoughts about as things progress but here I want to share some thoughts about my main Twitter profile @dannyt.

This is basically my "me" account. Considering I've been on Twitter for quite a while (since Nov 2006!) I have only a modest following (426 at time of writing) as I've been mainly a follower and reader more so than tweeting very much and never really engaging with others. I'm making a concious effort to change this behaviour and engage more with people whose tweets I find interesting or insightful and sharing more of what I'm working on.

What do you get if you cross a computer nerd with a mountain biker?

Other than work, my second passion is mountain biking. The mountain biking world seems to have jumped on the social media bandwagon with phenomenal success. The top riders (who have a somewhat celebrity status) are all over Twitter and Facebook and the media producers create some truly amazing video and photography.

As a result there is some crossover between my interests of web and technology and that of mountain biking. Herein lies a dilemma. Whilst there is some crossover the vast majority of conversations are fairly mutually exclusive. Certainly the majority of my geek friends could care less about whether Gee or Minaar will be able to topple Gwin in this years world cup series. Even more so, my mtb friends wouldn't give a rats arse about the latest approach to responsive images. Both things I find particularly interesting!

Follower Experience

As I've been diving into my social media experiment and making more effort to get involved in discussions, I've really started to notice this difference in interests and the people I share them with. I had a growing concern for the relevancy of my input with either group. So I shared this:

Which triggered some great feedback from others:

So what of it?

Nothing. Yet. The wise thoughts above echoed my own thinking and ultimately, there is still a huge amount of value to be gleaned from a smaller group of interested followers than auditing my self for the sake of building a large follower count or "vanity metric" as Eric Ries might put it (I also have an interest in startups :P).

I do see value in creating separate accounts as I can be more focused and perhaps add less noise to the already constantly changing, fast-moving conversation on Twitter. But for now I don't feel the added effort is worth it, we'll see.

Yes ramblings about technology and business might fall on deaf muddy biker ears. Likewise talk of trails, jumps, berms and biker elite might be alien to the geek-core but so far 426 people are putting up with it. Who knows maybe more than expected ARE interested in both sides, maybe the 'noise' from the other isn't an issue. Someone's tweets about something I'm not interested in has never bothered me, but I have seen "I'm fed up of [whoever] going on about football/golf/whatever" tweets and announcements that they're unfollowing that person as a result. But then I've also never thought that [whoever] will have lost a lot of sleep over it.

So for now, tech, bikes, business, startups and whatever else will continue to be what you can expect from @dannyt. Let me know if you're on board with any of that and maybe we can chew the cud over Twitter :)

So here's a couple of things I'm into that I think everyone will enjoy:

Geeky: Pseudo holographic display with Kinect:

MTB: Anthill films - Strength in Numbers

Strength in Numbers - Official Trailer from Anthill Films on Vimeo.