A Twitter Novice Assesses his Progress
Twitter is well outside my comfort zone. I’m wordy, and I must express myself in 140 characters; I’m not that easy with meeting new people, and what’s the point if you don’t meet new people? Of course, I can’t evaluate my progress in 140 characters–no surprise there–so I’m writing a blog post.
I’m at 173 followers, and following 180 (Follow me). I probably need to do just a little bit of cleanup on who I’m following, but not much. If I’m following someone I don’t really want to, it’s probably because they don’t tweet enough to get on my nerves.
So what were my goals at the start? I must confess they were somewhat scrambled, because Twitter just looked like a mess to me. But they quickly evolved into the following, in order of priority:
- Learn something about online marketing, including use of social media.
- Fill in some of those conversations that stimulate the mind and creative juices, but are missing from the home office.
- Market my own name, company, and services
- Connect with friends and family
At first, my goal of learning about online marketing proved rather difficult simply because Twitter does not produce information in the way I’m programmed to consume it–in substantial doses on subjections I’m already thinking about. But this has changed with TweetDeck, which allowed me to group those I follow according to the major topic that enticed me to follow them in the first place. It took me a bit to get TweetDeck set up the way I wanted, but now that I’ve done so, I’m a fan. I can now go to the column for “Marketers” and look through the recent tweets and find stuff that is interesting.
I’ve noticed some annoyance around the Twitterverse with people who post mostly links. I think I’m guily myself. But I have found my best information through those links. The Tweet gets me interested, and I go read the blog post or other item afterward.
On my second goal, conversations, I’ve been pretty much a failure. Those few replies I’ve sent have apparently not gotten anything started. In this case I suspect it’s time and finding the people who share enough interest for conversation.
On the third, I haven’t really done that much work on actually pushing products and services. One reason is simply that I’m at a point where production has to take priority over marketing. Energion Publications is a very small company, and that means not everything gets attention at once. On the other hand, I know that by linking my Twitter account to my Facebook profile I have increased blog readership and also started some Facebook conversations.
Finally, almost nobody amongst my family and friends uses Twitter. All of my success in that area has been via Facebook, which is working quite well.
When someone follows me at this point I tend to check out their profile and recent tweets before I add them. I’ve been followed by quite a number of folks with a single update that really is an ad. But with the ability to group people, I’ve been willing to follow quite a number of people who only overlap my interests in a few areas, and many of those have proven interesting.
With that, the quest for Twitter usefulness continues!
