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Twitter instead of RSS?

Published on February 15, 2009 · 4:24 pm UK · 36 comments

in Communication, RSS, Social Media, Twitter, Web

Hmm, some interesting thoughts about RSS and Twitter from Dutch entrepreneur Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten – the man behind TwitterCounter, TwitterRemote and other interesting things – in his latest email newsletter about The Next Web:

A few weeks ago we started noticing a trend: our Twitter account was getting more and more followers every day. In fact, it seems to grow faster than our RSS feed subscribers!

[…] [We] asked a lot of people on Twitter about the difference between RSS and Twitter. It seems that more and more people are using Twitter as a alternative to RSS to get their news. Some directly subscribe to our Twitter account and follow our new posts updates and some just pick up links to stories from their friends. We have started seeing a lot of retweets of our post urls and general tweets too.

It seems to me that now is a good time to register a new account for your blog (if you have one!), brand or company. Twitter is developing into a unique delivery mechanism to get your story out to your community. And contrary to RSS it also gives you tools to interact with your community and see the impact of your tweets.

I now keep a window open at all times with a search for "TheNextWeb" via Twitter search so I can see when people retweet or reply to our stories. It gives us insight into what works in a way that RSS just can’t match.

I’ve noticed the same as Boris – the growth in my Twitter followers is greater than the growth in RSS subscribers, a trend that begain about four months ago.

How about you? Do you see Twitter as an alternative to RSS?

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