If you've ever been hiking out in the woods for an extended period of time, you know that running into wildlife is one of the inherit dangers. Most of the time its the harmless creatures like deer, squirrel and the occasional raccoon that one runs into out on the trail. Sometimes you run into something bigger. Sometimes you cross paths with a bear.

Spending a lot of time on the trails at Smokey Mountain National Park the summer of 2008, I came across many a bear. How did Twitter help me survive these encounters?

It didn't. At all.

So why write this post?

Well, this post has a two-fold purpose. First, it reiterates the importance of headlines. To grab those key clicks, you need a title that will entice the reader and make them want to learn more. Unlike this post, the headline shouldn't actually mislead your reader. Some of my future traffic may see some damage.

Secondly it's mostly an experiment on my part. I feel that in the vast majority of retweets come from simply re-tweeting the title and not reading the article in full. I'm curious to see how often this post gets retweeted by those thinking Twitter could really help them in a scrape. Or retweeted simply because of the title. Either way, we'll see how this experiement goes (don't let that stop you from retweeting...see what happens). I'll report what happens in a post next week traffic-wise.

If you really thought Twitter could help you in a bear attack, I'm sorry. But come on, seriously?

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• How Do I Use Twitter? (sweetbusinesses.com)