Thanks for commenting and providing the links. I do think that procedures can be written in Twitter, and more than just 1 or 2 steps at a time. Just as in any procedure, you certainly wouldn’t have a large number of steps; there would still be a minimal number. I have discussed some of your concerns in this post and the related ones (for instance, order of steps and inclusion of links to more detailed information). Also, I think that if you have a dedicated feed, people could always open just that feed and follow the procedure more easily.

I think that there would be a mix of procedure steps and links to other material. It would depend on the situation. This is a broad overview, but I see troubleshooting in a real-time situation to require more steps in tweets, and those for education would contain links to other materials. Still, I think it would be a mix. You may also have to repeat some tweets, or have follow-up tweets, as they pass so quickly in timelines.

Links to the other posts in this series are included above.

Overall, I’m guessing procedures have their place on Twitter, but past 1 to 2 steps, not a lot of Twitter readers will make sense of your procedure, depending on how many other people they follow in their timeline. And there’s the reverse chron order problem.

But, helping an individual by @ addressing them and sending them to a link to a video might help them in real time. This is what some bigger support orgs are doing now. Check out this blog entry from a support rep: http://beingguy1067.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/self-help-networks/. He was actively monitoring Twitter to find people he could help with troubleshooting. “I remember one instance at the beginning of the year when I went onto Tweetdeck and read a tweet from someone who was trying to find out how to take the SIM card out of their iPhone. I sent them a link to a YouTube video showing them how to do it. Unfortunately, the person didn’t have a paperclip, but what was interesting was that this person was on a train, and the train was in the States.” (He was across the Atlantic.)

What are your thoughts – especially the difference between procedures for educating and procedures for troubleshooting?

Thanks again for commenting; your input is very helpful. As I thought about possible use cases, more ideas came to mind. They warranted more discussion, which I thought would be too long for a comment. So I wrote a blog post about it: 5 Reasons to Write Procedures in Twitter. Please look there for some of my thoughts.

I think that your idea about using hashtags is excellent. That would certainly help tag and organize information. You’ve got me thinking about this one!

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the use cases for using Twitter to document a procedure. I guess the most obvious case is when a user contacts you with a problem or a question. (“I downloaded your app and I can’t figure out how to configure my iPhone to use it.”) But I can also think of others, such as when you need urgently to get a set of instructions out to your users: Oops, we just discovered that your product licenses are all going to expire in 2 hours unless you do thus-and-such. I imagine that your strategy for doing triage and responding to feedback would vary, depending on the use case.

One other point: To keep your tweets from being interrupted by others, maybe you should use a hashtag. Granted, it would consume precious real estate (your 140-character steps would now have to fit into, say, 130). But the benefits, including directing other users to your tweets, might be worth it.