I co-wrote the following article with the Enterprise Officer from Social Ignition. I thought I would pop it here also since I think it has some great points about Twitter and TV show Tweeting: TV Tweeting Etiquette – How to Tweet TV Shows on Twitter – If you have a favorite TV show and you’re a big Twitter user, you will undoubtedly want to tweet about it. The fun in TV tweeting comes in the group experience, the banter, thoughts of others and the conversations you can have about the TV shows you love.
If you’re in a different timezone to those you’re following, the group experience of TV tweeting can be a painful one, as you either mute people for the duration, or hope they don’t post important spoilers. If you’re in front of people you follow, you need to keep their feelings in mind when posting anything spoiler related. It’s not hard, but we all make mistakes from time to time. Still some TV Twitequette could be the answer.
What if they don’t care about Tweeting TV spoilers?
So what is the remedy to Twitter spoiling things for you. Sure, the easy answer is don’t go on Twitter while your favorite shows are on elsewhere. That means you can’t tweet to those Twitter friends who also watch those shows and won’t spoil. There’s always the mute option, but who wants to go through their friends muting people who ‘might’ post a TV spoiler.
Tip: Be vague and only put in semi spoiler info if the show has aired all over
#Spoiler
Simple, why don’t we use a #Spoiler hashtag at the start of a tweet we feel contains a TV spoiler. This is a good idea to a degree, but what happens when someone accidentally types “#spoler can’t believe Bill just died in True Blood“… bummer. Also if you tend to read quickly you may well see something and then it’s too late, even with the #Spoiler hashtag.
Twitter call to action
Why don’t Twitter integrate semi intelligent automated spoiler help into their API, this would be a fairly simple addition wherein anyone typing the #Spoiler hashtag at the start of their tweet, it automatically changed the text color to that of the background color of the Twitter client. Twitter could also implement a system where even typos are picked up in the same manner (something many of the chatbot / virtual assistant AI’s use to pick up on human error). So Twitter would add in #spoler #Spiler Spoilr #Spoile #Poiler and variations of into the API with them equating to the original #Spoiler tag. Simple.
Can we count on Twitter users?
Herein lay the main problem. If you’re a regular Twitter user you will probably know that those people you follow who tweet TV may already be self editing their tweets out of nicety, because they don’t want to spoil it for anyone in their stream. Other people though don’t give a toss about your feelings and will quite happily post all and sundry without a #Spoiler tag in sight. Will these latter people use the #Spoiler tag if it is implemented?
Yes most will use a #Spoiler hashtag
Peer pressure is a wonderful thing, well in this instance anyway. Psychologically speaking it could be assumed most people would utilize the #Spoiler tag if it were implemented hard into the Twitter API. They would do so because not doing so would inevitably lose them followers and gain them the ire of those following them who were using the tag. One would assume the #Spoiler tag, if hard coded to effect the tweet stream, would become ‘just the way it rolls’ as far as Twitter users are concerned.
Tip: Info without giving anything away and use GetGlue & GoMiso to keep track of your viewing
More letters if using the #Spoiler hashtag
Another way Twitter could softly enforce the use of the TV #Spoiler tag would be to negate these characters in the twitter stream, so instead of leaving you with 132 characters the 8 characters that #Spoiler uses would not be counted in the overall tweet leaving you with the full 140 characters to work with.
Tweeting about TV on Twitter is fun
I’ve ‘met’ some great people on Twitter and we’ve had some cool conversations about TV shows. Whether we’re all watching TV ‘together’ with real-time banter, or we’re just discussing plot points, genres, specific shows or whatever it may be, we have a blast.
When it works Twitter is a great medium for TV conversation and if everyone thought about everyone else and some weren’t so time-zone centric, it would be even better. Though I have to say, the people I follow are fairly awesome and getting people you like in your tweetstream (and removing the odd nutcase) means you can pretty much chat TV all hours of the day and night if you want to.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to talk TV on Twitter, add me and we’ll get you started, it’s a lot of fun.
Some TV Twitter check in applications I like:
GetGlue: http://getglue.com/
@GetGlue [TV, movie, book etc check in system that auto tweets to Twitter]
Find me on Miso: http://gomiso.com/
@GoMiso [TV check in system that auto tweets to Twitter]