For want of a nail

Y’all know how I find in Twitter an endless source of wonder and amusement. And not just from the actual, you know, wit (or lack thereof) found in the tweets.

I’ve noted how you don’t need to actually tweet to get thousands of followers; the validation of the dictum that on the Interwebz; no one knows you’re a dog, so you can call yourself a game-changing thought leader without anyone calling you out; and how the Twitterati think that sending you an obviously system-generated direct message inviting you to buy their products or services is a way of faking sincere engagement.

I also watch how people basically shoot themselves in the foot by rushing to tweet before they quite grasp all the rules, either social or technical.

A case in point is a woman who makes her living helping job seekers. I met her at a group in the Valley They Call Silicon, and she seems genuinely to want to share useful tips. But she makes a basic mistake in her tweets that throws up a hurdle to her target audience connecting with her or her advice.

Viz.: she jams the website address to the site(s) with information against her little teaser blurb. Doing that means the URL is not hot-linked, which means people can’t click on it and go to the site. They have to copy and paste it into a browser.

Now, you might think this is not an insurmountable obstacle, and you’d be right. But you’d also be ignoring the fact that people are lazy and they have a short attention span. A basic dictum of communication is that you don’t make your audience work any harder than absolutely necessary to get your message. Making them copy and paste the URL (and not overshoot in copying so you get a 404 result), instead of clicking, is working too hard in Webland.

I actually DM’d her a few months ago to point that out, but she didn’t acknowledge my message, and she continued shooting herself in the foot.

Yesterday I noticed that she’s also taken to blowing her hashtags by doing the same thing: the one here without a space before it does not show up in hashtag searches.

You know—it’s not that hard to tweet right, especially when she’s not bordering on the 140-charachter limit. It’s a pity that she won’t take on board a couple of simple corrections, both for her and for the people who could benefit from her help.