RSSI am now a pretty addicted user of Twitter. I check my feed regularly during the day and post at least a Tweet or two every couple of hours if I can.
However, one thing I am really concerned about is breaking what seems to be the “unwritten protocols” of social networking and annoying either one, or all of my friends or followers. The fact is, try as I might, I don’t seem to be able to find any written record of how a user should, or shouldn’t interact with others on Twitter, or for that matter any other social network.
I had a bunch of “protocol” type questions when I first started using Twitter, most of which I still don’t have the definitive answer to. These include:
- Acknowledging followers: Are you meant to say hello to new followers?
- Unfollowing: Is it polite to tell someone when you unfollow them, or warn people you are about to unfollow someone?
- Linking to blog posts: If you tweet a link to a new self-written blog post, do you need to specify its a link to a blog post?
- Greetings: Is it rude to not say good morning and good night to those online, or is it over the top to do so?
The fact is, whilst these questions (and others) apply to Twitter, similar questions apply to all social networks. The problem is that most services do seem to have a social norm – in most cases unwritten – associated with their use. By not knowing how to behave new users can quickly alienate themselves from others on the service, thus ruining their experience before they even begin.
This would seem to suggest that publishing these “social network norms” should be something useful for administrators of the services to do. However, this would go against what I would imagine is the philosophy of most of these companies/founders, that being that the services can be used however the users see fit (within reason and the law of course). This must be an interesting challenge for anyone maintaining a social network!!
