When to Blog vs. Tweet

I’m trying to come up with a simple decision tree, or flowchart, for when something should be tweeted vs. when it should get the respect of a full blog entry. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Move through the blogging rules below and see if you get a match. If you don’t, move on to the Twitter rules. Note: all blog rules assume that the post is blog-worthy according to your existing standard, whatever that may be.

When to Blog It

• idea cannot be reduced to 140 characters
• the idea is meant to encourage intelligent conversation
• the idea is designed to gather input
• the idea is important enough to be associated with your identity
• you’re posting non-twitter-supported media, e.g. videos
• when you want it to last (think searchable 5 years from now)
• asks for input that you want to capture

When to Tweet It

• personal status update, e.g. seeing movie x, landed in san francisco
• you’re broadcasting the existence of interesting content on your blog
• the idea can be condensed to 140 characters
• random, somewhat interesting idea, but not worth blogging (else, blog)

If you don’t get a match after running through both sets of rules then you either shouldn’t be sharing what you were about to share or you need to adjust your rules.

Obviously these rules are based on my own personal conceptualizations of blogging and Twitter, so you may have to adjust accordingly. But hopefully this first attempt will prove useful to someone. ::