Problems with the Twitter/Blog Hookup

I generally try to resist the temptation of putting up a link to each new blog post in my twitter feed. Of course, I generally fail to resist this temptation (one of the reasons I try to resist this is that my tweets appear on my blog and having them be a bunch of links to my post is not pleasant). Using the excellent backtweets.com, I can get a pretty good picture of who is tweeting my posts, who is retweeting and so on. This has lead me to notice some worrying issues that require some pretty detailed attention.

The title of my blog is ‘Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media’. When you bring up the page for a post, Typepad creates a title for the web page which is the blog title appended to the post title. I really don’t like this, but have thus far failed to find out the right lever to pull to disable this behaviour.

For example, my post drawing an analogy between Twitter and free electricity has the title ‘Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: Twitter: Free electricity for All’. What a mess!

There are certain cases where people pass this link on in Twitter. Unfortunately, there is almost no way for any of the real meaning of the post to survive. I see things like:

• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: Twitter ... http://bit.ly/vHNry
• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: Twitter ...: In explaining the popularity of Twitter t.. http://bit.ly/19Xwq1

I see lots of the first and plenty of the second. Who would click on that? There’s no real information about what the article is about.

However, when people retweet my tweet about my blog posts, I see the content of my tweet – which I now try to make a concise representation of the post or at least the title. Thus:

• RT @matthewhurst Twitter is like free electricity: http://tinyurl.com/nvua9c
• Twitter is like free electricity ~ http://tr.im/wZHt

The latter is perhaps more like a stolen retweet, but you get the idea.

This is all pretty messy – and you may not care – but if you are setting up a blog at Typepad, be aware of the issue with blog/post title concatenation. If you want to better own the message of your blog post, you may have to give in and tweet all your blog posts as well.

Anyone else fumbling around with this stuff? Anyone from Typepad like to help out?

Comments

[Nigel Legg]

If I see a post on twitter and cannot identify at least a little of what the page the link is for is about, I ignore it. Simply using the title of the page brings up a whole load of mess - headlines repeated (you know, when the first line of the opening para is the same as the headline). What people have to remember is that, while a tweet is only 140 characters, it is copy in the same way as your blog is - what you say and how you write it say a lot about you (or your company). The kind of tweets you talk about above are, in my opinion, sheer laziness.

[blog building services]

Twitter and blogging is much better if you both using this. Excellent entry!thanks for this post.

-jomie-

[Alex Deve]

Hey Matthew, this is Alex from TypePad. We're currently working on giving the option for the blogger to edit and customize what's being sent to twitter. In your opinion, would that address the issue you're raising?

[Matthew Hurst]

Alex - thanks for the response.

Certainly providing the twitter user the option of using either the title of the blog, the title of the post, both, or some portion of the text of the post would be good.

However, there is a larger problem here which is in part due to my overly long blog title, but also due to the manner in which each post is a concat of the blog title and the post title. I'd like to be able to set the (html) title of my posts to be just the title of the post with no blog title in there. Alternatively, to have a long and short blog title. Fixing this issue at the source would trickle down so that twitter users would by default tweet what the blog post author intended (but - following your suggestion - be able to adjust that too).

[Heliopsis]

I know it's a late note but just chiming in from the etsy side of things... The twitter sharing option automatically pops up like:

"Klette III Klemmstativ Kaiser Camera Clamp and by heliopsis on Etsy http://bit.ly/5CBq6f"

whereas we feel it is way more preferable (and personable) to clarify and shorten things:

"small tripod. almost works. #transssssformers http://bit.ly/5CBq6f"

It may not be the best salesmanship but at least it is to the point.

For the Etsian twitterers that we follow, it is an eyesore to see a big ugly string of autotweets and nothing personal or insightful. I almost never click on those.