Twitter: MEform vs. INform

I saw the post about meformers vs. informers on Steve Rubel’s Lifestream and thought it was an incredibly poignant way to illustrate the majority of people who are contributing to Twitter. I know I’m guilty of quite a lot of “meforming” – that is, updates that are “me” centric (what I’m doing, the projects I’m working on, an annoying experience I just had, my interaction in a restaurant, and the list is endless). This type of information is put up against the “informing” kind – which provides useful information to the community (links, articles, in other words, things that add value to other peoples’ lives). That’s not to say that informing is superior to meforming in all situations but it is interesting to look at the breakdown of who Tweets what. According to a recent study

“The communication and information professors, Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase, found that there tend to be two types of Twitter folks. The majority, or 80 percent, were what they called ‘meformers’ — Twitter users who sent out messages that revolved around themselves, updating others about their activities or sharing thoughts and feelings.

The other 20 percent are ‘informers’ — people who were actually sharing information. Not surprisingly, the informers tended to have larger social networks and be more interactive.”

If you’re looking to integrate more INformation into your posts, Twitter just launched a re-tweet tool that may help you! Hubspot explains how it works:

On your Twitter sidebar, you’ll notice a new option under your Favorites called “Retweets.” Clicking this will show you three different tabbed options: Retweets by others, Retweets by you and Your tweets, retweeted.

Perhaps the biggest implication of the new Retweet function from a marketing perspective is the increased importance of creating quality, unique tweets that others will want to retweet.  Because retweets are associated with the original user, that user who originated the tweet will have more widespread reach and visibility via the Twitter timelines of others who may not be following them.

Of course, if you determine that MEforming is more your style, you’ll still want to make sure you’re incorporating your updates with your personal brand.

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