There are 3 kinds of tweepel in this world

OK, so I realise that sounds like the start of some bad joke, but whilst walking the dog tonight, I started thinking about how there are different types of users out on twitter, and wanted to try and nail it down to the lowest common denominator. First, let me say that I believe that this is a subjective view, and that although all of us will agree that there are different kind of people on twitter, what we may disagree is how they are segregated, and this is my view.

So here we go!

These are the highest order groups that I believe exist, and although you can probably break each of these down into lower groups, that is not important for my purpose. My purpose is to segregate the users that I am aware of, so that I know who I am following and why.

Community

Community users are the ones we all pretty much are and want to be. They are the users that want to engage and be engaged. They start with an account and build on the followers by following and tweeting. They are not necessarily a ‘nobody’, they may get hundreds or thousands of followers because of who they are, but their accounts exist because they want to engage.

Community users tweet to spread information that they are interested in – personal or business. They like to get responses, or for the better part they will try and respond and engage with the users that tweet to them. They may be interested in building a community of friends of followers on one topic or on several topics. But there interest is primarily for the community.

Sure, they may be looking at exploiting that community for their business benefit, such as potential customer leads or business opportunities, but that is not their main focus. They believe that by having a string network, and in this case through twitter, they will be able to tap into information and spread information within the communities of interest that they participate in.

Broadcasters

Broadcasters are really the other broad group. They are the other guys, the ones that aren’t interested in engaging. They have information, and that is the commodity that they are spreading. There are many examples of these; CNN, ABC News, New York Times, Twitter itself and even Britney Spears. They are extremely unlikely, if at all, going to engage with anyone that tweets them. But that is not their interest, they have information to share, and Twitter is one of their channels to share this information.
In some instances they aren’t even real people, but bots posting the messages. So they are unable to respond.

But it is not important that there may not be a real person here, and they server a purpose. They are not BAD. If you are interested in news broadcasts, your best channel to get this information may be to subscribe to some of the news channels. If you are a Britney fan, why not subscribe to her to get the latest. They serve a purpose.

Marketers

The marketers are a fine line. One could argue that they are broadcasters in one sense, spreading information, and then become engaging for the purpose of selling a product or services (and therefore part of a community) when communicated to.

And yes, this includes the “read my 10 reasons why you can be rich” twitterers as well as the “Buy my latest book” twitterers. But I put them in a category of their own, because their purpose is different, and therefore how I as a user engage with them may be different.

Marketers will attempt to use twitter to build a community around something they are selling. But in this instance it is not under the pre-tense that they are building community. They are blatantly using twitter as a channel for sales like they would use email. In many ways they could be considered the spammers of twitter, because much of the information is unsolicited advertising.

Why These Classifications?

I am basing these classifications on how I use twitter, because although there are similarities between each of the above, when I look at a user, I try and put them into one of these buckets before I decide whether to follow or not, engage or monitor closely.

How do I do this?

If I see the user is not replying to users, but is simply putting out tweets, or I see that they have thousands of followers and yet not following many. This is a broadcaster to me. If the user’s timeline is many conversations going on with various users sprinkled with random tweets that are either business or personal driven, then this is community. Finally, if after identifying a Broadcaster or a Community Twitterer, but their tweets read like product advertisements, then I put these guys into the Marketer Bucket.

Do you think there might be other broad categories that exist?