Dear Gwynne – Here is Why You Should Also Use Twitter

Here is a personal note I composed for a dear friend that recently called to ask me “why bother with Twitter - I don’t get it”. She’s on Facebook now and is just starting to ‘get it’ with regards to building communities online in these new ways. I’m hoping this will be of help to others.

Dear Gwynne -

Thank you for your note about Twitter and how you just don’t get how Twitter works compared to Facebook. I applaud you for moving your traditional mailing list marketing efforts into a Facebook community.  Doing so will help you stay connected with people in Facebook who know you.  Facebook will help you build a community to continue providing insightful support to people who want to use symbolism and models of astrology as a guide to finding themselves and happiness in their life.

You’re right, Twitter is different and at first it seems overly simplified.  There is no on-going flow of people’s thoughts and actions showing up. Well, not until you start befriending others on Twitter. That requires finding people that don’t know you and waiting for others to find you.  Give it some time.  Your Twitter BIO should have the keywords that describe you and your personal interests. You’ll find over time people seek you out on Twitter like they used to do in Google Search engines finding your monthly writings and then asking you to be on your mailing list.  Now people find your Twitters and they decide to follow you.  Like signing up to be on an email list, people ONLY FOLLOW who they really ‘want’ to follow. It’s not a numbers game, it’s about quality of conversation.

Think of Twitter as a kind of  ‘birds of feather’ group where people share thoughts and ideas and links with each other. You want people that add value to your life by sending along new ideas or thought you have not seen before from the Internet. They uncover valuable insights that you appreciate. I only follow 40 or so folks on Twitter and most of them  do not post often. Only a few post daily. But the ones I follow have very high value content. I often reTweet which means I  forward their Tweet along to my list of about 400 which gives them more visibility.  This BTW is how you build up your Twitter community (also called your social graph on Twitter).  Say something useful and post a relevant link. Others will follow.

I’m not interested in how many glasses of water people drink or when they are going to bed at night.  I ignore those folks or just drop them from my follow list. You DO NOT have to follow everyone that follows you. Don’t let others chide you into thinking that. I’m not trying to be hard here just practical.  I think conversation is important but to me having ‘useful’ conversation is more important.

Make sure you put your Twitter address on your email signature and on your web page. You will want to grab your particular  Twitter name before someone else does,  just like you do with Internet domains.  Keep that in mind for now even if you don’t post often, yet.

So for you, post those amazing insights you have each day. Posts a link to your monthly astrology forecasts. Unlike Facebook, practically everyone on  Twitter is visible on the Internet so find interesting people to follow and reTweet their posts. There is an entire subculture of people building amazing Twitter search tools which folks are using to find others they are interested in following. Facebook is more of a ‘who you know’ kind of place where Twitter is more of a ‘what you know’ kind of place to build community.  In fact you can go to http://search.twitter.com and see Twitter posts on whatever topic you pick by dropping in a keyword word or two. It’s in real time from people all over the world. Try that in Facebook – you can’t do it.  Do it on Twitter and find people who are authoring Tweets on topic of interest to you. Click on their FOLLOW button.

The Twitter.com website is fairly dry and uninteresting. I hardly ever use it now. I use TweetDeck because I can see more of the conversation that is occurring from my community of friends. I highly recommend finding a desktop and iPhone Twitter application versus using the Twitter home page.

Enjoy building your community. The next time we talk I’ll show you how to use tools like FriendFeed to automatically repost your blog articles into Twitter and Facebook and find more friends for your community(ies = social graphs). In addition there is a Netscape plug-in tool called Feedley to help you further your efforts in finding relevant information and like minded souls around the world to be in community with.

Tom

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.