Yesterday I spent some time some members of the VC Star team where we talked about ways we could improve the VC Star's main twitter account (@vcstar).

Here is what I didn't like about the way the twitter account was being used:

• It's almost entirely "breaking" news which tends to be focused on negative news (fires, shootings, court cases, stabbings, etc) and doesn't highlight the wide breadth of content that gets published by the VC Star every day
• Almost all of the content is automated from an RSS feed so sentences get cut off and the "teaser" text is rarely compelling
• It's pretty obvious no one is manning the ship (thanks to the automated feed and the lack of following back), which really cuts down on how much people can engage (i.e. replies and retweets) with the VC Star on Twitter
  

After a great discussion, here are the changes we decided to make: 

• We're going to create a new twitter account for breaking news (@vcsbreaking) for people who want to continue to get this automated feed on twitter!
• The updates to the main twitter account (@vcstar) will now include a mixture of breaking news and general interest stories similar to what we've been doing with the VC Star FB page
  

Obviously, if you like the breaking news feed, then by all means, please subscribe to @vcsbreaking where we'll continue to give you that same great feed!  

And since you made it this far, you might be interested in some of the social media theory behind the changes as well as an overview of the social media project I'm working on with the VC Star.

What do you think of these changes?  Is there something else you'd like to see us do on Twitter? Facebook?