Would You Please Please Please Please Please Please Please Stop Talking?

Social media is all about sharing. It offers many channels for those who like to talk about themselves and others, à la Mrs. Kravitz, the archetypal nosy neighbor on “Bewitched.” The person writing can’t see if his or her interlocutor is rolling their eyes or nodding off; meanwhile, the audience can simply ignore the steady stream of posts. Or can they?

Last week the Seattle Police Department (SPD) experimented with its official Twitter feed. (Read one of the many stories, here written by the Seattle Times.) As part of a campaign to make its work more transparent to the community, the SPD tweeted nearly all of its emergency calls during a 12-hour period. Even with the elimination of dispatches pertaining to “sensitive” topics such as domestic violence and child abuse, the message count still reached over 475 by day’s end. While many Twitter followers appreciated this view into a typical day on the force, many others expressed their irritation as the flood of SPD posts clogged the view of their Twitter streams — an average of 40 per hour. That made me think — how much is too much? How many tweets or Facebook posts can you make before your audience cries “Enough already!”?

I have to commend the SPD for trying to use new social tools to create awareness and strengthen its relationship with the community — except, it didn’t. According to the seattlepi.com, by only 2 p.m. the @SeattlePD Twitter account had already lost as many as 300 followers! Some may come back, but some may find they don’t miss the tweets. There’s a degree of inertia involved; I find that it requires a lot to make me “unfollow” someone. There has to be an unending barrage of totally irrelevant and boring tweets to make me click the button. But once I do, that person is probably gone from my stream for good.

While many people compared the SPD “tweet-athon” to a police scanner, there is one crucial distinction — on a police scanner, all the dispatches relate to the police. The listener is choosing to subject himself to that steady drumbeat of information, to the exclusion of other subjects. (It’s unlikely the listener has multiple scanners going, although my police officer father would read, watch TV and listen to the scanner simultaneously.) Moreover, after the dispatch is aired, it’s gone, poof. Meanwhile, using a Twitter feed, the follower is expecting to take in messages from a variety of people all in a glance. But in the SPD situation, a person could glance at the screen and find the entire Twitter feed filled with police tweets, which would linger there until something else is posted. It “drowns” out news from other sources that may have posted only a short time ago. Unlike Facebook, there’s no option to choose tweets from your favorites over “most recent.”

A similar situation often arises when someone attends a seminar or a press conference. Suddenly, you see dozens of posts per hour from a person who may normally tweet only a couple of times a day. I’ve often seen people send a tweet out announcing that he/she will live-blog a presentation, thereby giving followers the opportunity to “turn off” tweets for the duration of the event. At the very least, the audience has an idea that this is a timed event and the tweet frenzy will eventually end.

The SPD plans to experiment further with Twitter, including having an officer tweet his neighborhood response calls.  Let’s hope they handle that event differently. A few suggestions:

1) Announce the experiment to followers a few days in advance — and announce it multiple times! — to give followers a chance to unsubscribe. There was no reason the SPD event needed to be a surprise. In fact, an early warning might have raised awareness and resulted in new followers interested in the experiment.

3) Tweet the end time of the experiment a few times throughout the day so that late-joiners will know that there’s an expiration time.

3) Consider setting up a separate Twitter feed and announcing the experiment — multiple times — to existing followers, requesting they follow that new feed. Obviously, this would need to start well in advance of the actual day, to give followers time to subscribe to the new account. This might also be a way to get people talking about the tweet-athon.

4) Increase tweet frequency over the days prior to the event, so that followers become accustomed to seeing regular tweets, instead of going from 0-100 mph in a day.

You’ll often notice that people will “jump on” Twitter or Facebook, post multiple times in an hour, and then go silent. (I do it, too.) One way to spread posts throughout the day is to use one of the many Twitter management tools, such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or CoTweet. On an enterprise level, our client Prosodic offers a social media intelligence platform that helps brands manage and analyze social media engagement.

So what is your tipping point for social media chatter? How many inane, profane or irrelevant posts does it take for you to “unfollow” or “unlike” someone?

(By the way, the title of this post is one of my favorite lines from Hemingway, from the 1927 short story Hills Like White Elephants. Yes, Hemingway again!)

Lisa Hawes can be reached at [email protected]. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LisaKayHawes.