Why Seth Godin doesn’t tweet

Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter. He has a Twitter account for his blog, but it’s just for his team to share his latest posts.

He’s made it clear before that he doesn’t have a problem with Twitter, and thinks some people make great use of it. In terms of his time and his focus, it’s just not where he wants to. As I’ve said before, it’s not that he’s necessarily “too busy”, but just that it likely is not a priority for him.

I’ve long been kinda bummed about that, simply because I think he’d have some great things to share on Twitter. It hit me today that he indeed does have great things to share on Twitter, but instead of quickly tweeting them he takes the time to develop those thoughts into more robust ideas and publish them on his blog.

Three kinds of Twitter users

In taking this further, I think Twitter users can be loosely grouped into three categories.

First, you have the Twitter-heavy folks. These are people that tweet fairly often, and tend to have great things to say. They’re good to follow on Twitter for their insights, as that’s their primary place to go.

Next, you have the Twitter-assisted people. These are folks that share ideas on Twitter for the use of crowd-sourcing responses and fully fleshing out their idea. Once they’ve gotten feedback and shaped their view a bit more, it becomes a full blog post.

Lastly, you have the Twitter-lite users, and I’d put myself in this group. I share my blog-produced thoughts on Twitter, follow and interact with other folks from time to time, but don’t produce a ton of unique content on there.

I’ve felt that I “should” be publishing more frequently on sites like Twitter, and maybe that’s accurate, but I’m finding the the work to publish full blog posts every day consumes much of the time that I would otherwise spend on there.

The Mona Lisa

Cal Newport wrote a post about why the Mona Lisa is famous despite not tweeting, and I think summarizes my thoughts pretty well with this quote:

…you’re almost certainly better off taking the 135 minutes per day the average social media user spends on these services and instead dedicate them to deliberately improving your ability to do valuable things.

Tweet if you want. I’ll likely follow you, enjoy your insights, and think more highly of you. However, also consider easing off on traditional social media a bit and put your time into content that will last.