The Twitter Mute Button
And why you shouldn’t be scared!
It’s not surprising at all, there is a lot of rubbish on Twitter, so they have introduced a new Mute button that will stop you from seeing tweets that you would “like to hear from less”. To be honest I’m quite happy about it. I would like to hear less from people endlessly “birdy bragging” (retweeting positive tweets from their followers, nobody likes an endless bragger) and get rid of some of the people who just don’t bother posting anything good. I could just delete these people BUT I won’t and I’ll come back to that later on.
Why shouldn’t you be scared?
That’s pretty simple to be honest. You shouldn’t be scared because you actually use Twitter to engage with people and 90% of the time you are just hanging out having conversations with real people about real things that are happening in the world. It’s just like being in a cafe and chatting to your friends but you can speak to people globally which allows you to experience different cultural ways of thinking that you would never have previously been able to encounter (and who said technology is stopping people from interacting).
So let’s just be clear. You aren’t scared because you use Twitter how it should be used. Don’t you? If you don’t then maybe you should be a little scared. Maybe you should change the way you look at Twitter. Maybe you should stop ramming your latest offer down your customer’s throats and just say “Hey”.
Let’s put it another way to really try and get this point across. Are you ever worried that your friends are going to tell you to shut up? Are you ever worried that some people you just met at a party are going to do the same? Now if you are anything like me the answer is sometimes yes but mostly no. On the whole I feel like I have something interesting to say and people will want to listen and at those times where I’m worried people don’t want to listen I’ve built up enough trust from previous conversations to make them listen anyway. I rarely get told to shut up and I treat Twitter like I treat conversations in person so call me arrogant but I don’t think I’ll be getting muted a hell of a lot.
Ok now I’m really scared!
Oh no! I’ve done something terrible and all of the above doesn’t sound like anything that you do on Twitter. Whatever shall you do?
CHANGE!
If you are scared that people will mute you change what you do so that it is un-mutable! As a quick exercise think about the things that you would mute (constant offers, excessive bragging) and then do the exact opposite of that and bam! You’ll have people reaching for the ‘volume up’ button!
Make yourself impossible to mute and people won’t. It’s really that simple.
P.s. Why I won’t unfollow
If I unfollow someone they might unfollow me and I don’t want my interactions to suffer because someone else posts a lot of things I don’t want to hear. That might sound selfish but really it’s selfish of people to think that all I want to hear about is that tweet they have reposted 50 times.
