I recently did a talk to the Twitter Developer Nest (a group of people in the UK developing applications on Twitter and utilising Twitter for business) on the different types of data that exist on Twitter.

The talk came out of a previous blog post of mine from which I created http://twimages.org – http://padajo.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/twitter-applications-persistence-and-twimages/. It also comes from many years of tweeting as @PaulDJohnston on Twitter.

The Big Thing – 5 Minutes Attention

Tweets last about 5 minutes. I’ve done a little research on this myself since the presentation, and 5 minutes is about the long and the short of it. There is very little interaction with a tweet after that time.

Why does this matter though? Well, it means that Twitter is a Now tool. It’s also a conversation tool. Getting people to read and then forward your content is important.  It makes your data more persistent.

Why Persistent and Transient?

Transient means “staying only a short time” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/transient) and Persistent means “constantly repeated” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/persistent).

I think that “staying only a short time” is a great definition of a tweet. If it’s only there and has attention for 5 minutes, then it’s really of little value.  Unless you can get it to be constantly repeated.

Twitter is microblogging. But with the microblog comes micro-attention.  We have to understand that attention is precious and small packets of attention can produce big results only if put together with many other packets of attention.

What this means for an Organisation or Brand

Twitter is one of the major tools in the social media arsenal now. A social media strategy will not be complete without fully working out where Twitter fits. Understanding Twitter and how to utilise is is key to any social media strategy. While not everyone is on twitter (yet), the idea of short messages that grab attention is becoming much more important as Facebook have changed their interface recently to adapt to the idea of short messages.

If you only have 5 minutes, then each tweet has to count. Nobody likes messages every few seconds or minutes that are auto-generated and as such you have to be careful about how often you tweet. But if you can utilise some of the ideas to generate more persistence, you can gain great interest and action.