How to Twitter – Twitter as a Survey Tool for Bloggers

Writer’s block comes eventually to all bloggers. You know you want to write a “7 ways to …” style article and you can only come up with 5 ways to do anything. What do you do? Like the song says, I get by with a little help from my friends. In this case my friends were my twitter followers.

The article I was writing yesterday was “7 Things You Should Pack/Bring When You Travel To San Francisco“. Once you have mentioned to take warm clothing and a camera, what’s left? So I sent out a tweat:

I am writing a blog post on “7 things you should pack when you travel to San Francisco”. I am a few short. Ideas?

Within about a half an hour I had five good responses from slightly over 1000 followers. That is about a .5% response rate, but I only needed two ideas and I had at least one I would not have thought of.

MikeTRose @chris2x Allergy medications. For some reason, East Coasters like me get the sniffles in SF.

That made perfect sense to me with the dampness of San Francisco, but it was outside my experience so it would not have occurred to me.

I think there are takeaways from this experience:

• I might do this in the future even if I can come up with 7 things on my own. Why not write a list of 9 things instead.
• People helped me out so I gave them credit because fair is fair.
• I had a 3rd takeaway a minute ago, what am I missing?