Following my last post (or take a look at all my Twtter posts here), my twitter system has been up and running for a few weeks now. Every day I switch domains and start tweeting about something else. The system seems to work well, although I have not had anybody register yet. However, I know that people are looking at the service as I can see the number of hits on my various web pages.
I suppose, people can just search twitter, so don’t need to register. But, the beauty of the system is that people don’t actually need to follow me on Twitter. They can register and then I will send them an email when I tweet about the subject they are interested in and, optionally send them an email of the actual tweets. Of course, I’d rather that they follow me but, they can if they wish, not even go near twitter, but just register and then wait for the emails or just do a search on twitter at the end of the day to see what I have had to say.
Having said that, when I do tweet about a certain subject, that is all I do. Unless you see the change domain tweet (which happens at 6am UK time), you are unlikely to be aware of the service. So, I have a few plans to try and raise the profile of the service.
- This is obviously one way; blog about it.
- I have been investigating how to collect potential twitter users and then tweet them directly about the service. In fact, the twitter search API provides this type of functionality and I’ll be looking at this soon.
- I think I might do a few more general tweets throughout the day, just linking to the service, rather than having all the tweets simply about the domain.
- I might also try and interact a little more with the publishers. INFORMS were good enough to retweet quite a few tweets, but I could do with more of that from the other publishers. It’ll be interesting anyway, just to see if that has any effect.
- And, of course, I have to make the tweets as interesting as possible. That is difficult as what is interesting to one person might not be interesting to another. I think the best solution is to have really targeted domains so that it might only be of interest to a small number of people, but they will find most of the tweets useful.
Finally, in case you are interested, the domains I currently tweet about are Bin Packing, Gambling, Genetic Algorithms, Healthcare, Timetabling and Vehicle Routing. More details are available here and I am open to suggestions for other areas of interest.