Climate Progress is poised to achieve another pair of milestones — 5,000 tweets and 20,000 twitter followers:
How tweet it is. You can help put us over the top by clicking here.
But why should you follow this blog on twitter? Four reasons:
- It’s a modern, portable version of a news teletype.
- Your (online) neighbors are doing it!
- The UK Guardian listed us as one of the Top 50 Twitter Climate Accounts to Follow.
- You can help some of our best content go viral.
Let me elaborate:
1. It’s like a modern news teletype. Some may think Twitter is only for dishing out 140 characters of trivial information to the kind of people who are interested in what Ashton Kutcher had for lunch. But in fact, for a blog, Twitter is more akin to an old fashioned “teleprinter (teletypewriter, Teletype or TTY),” which for much of the second half of the 20th century was a must-have in newsrooms and anywhere else that wanted to keep up with the latest breaking news.
As Climate Progress articles are posted, Twitter followers get the headline plus a TinyUrl to access the whole piece. Since the next several months will see lots of breaking news on the Presidential election, Keystone XL pipeline, EPA, the disinformers, clean energy, climate science, and extreme weather you’ll get the news delivered immediately to you ahead of everyone else. Not only won’t this cost you a penny, it’s surely a lot better than this ever was:
2. Your (online) neighbors are already following Climate Progress on Twitter! Since going on Twitter in April 2009 (see “How tweet it is“) we amassed over 10,000 followers by January 2011. And we’ve been adding followers at the rate of 1,000 a month, which I’m told is a lot. I’m also told that latest behavioral psychology research says the best way to persuade people to adopt a certain behavior is to make sure they know that their neighbors and people are doing it. Well, they are. All the time. Do they know something you don’t? Do they also have more compact fluorescent LED light bulbs and a bigger solar PV system and a smaller carbon footprint than you? Get with it, readers.
3. The UK Guardian listed us first among bloggers to follow on Twitter.
4. You can help some posts go viral on twitter be retweeting the headlines and tinyurl. Take a recent viral post like, “The 1% Have a Stranglehold on Politics: New Al Jazeera Documentary Sheds Light on the Koch Brothers.” It had 430 retweets. I estimate the average CP follower has 400 to 500 followers of their own ( some only have 100, many have a few hundred, and some half 15,000). That means as many as 200,000 people are potentially exposed to the headline and link. And we get a decent click-through rate. So this really gets the word out on CP posts.
Plus, this year there has been actual tweeting from Climate Progress separate from the posts. Ace clean energy blogger Stephen Lacey has been tweeting his thoughts and retweeting other sites’ best stuff. I have been tweeting some of the best lines and facts that weren’t captured in CP post headlines.
To follow Climate Progress on Twitter, click here. Do it for your kids.
Of course, you can still do it the “old”-fashioned way, with my RSS feed, where you get the previous 24 hours’ posts delivered to your inbox — see sign up box on the right hand column. Or like us on Facebook. Or visit the site a couple times a day. Or make Climate Progress your homepage!
Ah, tweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee!Ah! I know at last the secret of it all!