I would consider myself an early adopter. I’ve been on Flickr for years. Probably since 2004. I’ve been through about 4 blogs (none of which really took off). Shortly after Facebook was opened to non-students, I joined whole-heartedly, happily updating my status on a daily basis.
But there was something about Twitter that was making me hold out. Maybe it’s the name. Maybe it was the first people that I knew who Twitter (those guys just turned me right off of it). Maybe it’s the fact that I just had my limit of social media and I was just on information overload. Life should be more simple without me clogging it with tweets from twits (or so I thought).
I even updated my Facebook status to say that I was refusing to tweet and was accused of being so 2008.
But finally I couldn’t take it. I joined.
And I’m loving it. Actually, I’m addicted.
For those of you under a rock, Twitter has been around for a few years, but recently gained popularity over the past year. Celebrities like Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have started to post tweets and Twitter devotees enjoy the seemingly close ties they have with the stars. For example, Lance Armstrong will frequently post about where he is (relevant if you follow the Tour de France) and what training rides he just finished (very relevant if you are an avid cyclist). Incidentally, many of these stars don’t Twitter themselves and instead have “their people” do it for them.
I’ve been reading just too much about Twitter and how essential it is to creating “buzz” for your site. I can see how it can be a powerful tool in driving traffic to your site. But even if I don’t use it for that, I can at least get with the times.
It’s weird. Because I’m being so secretive about my business venture, I haven’t told my real network of people about my new blog and I will not be adding them to my Twitter. (I may for people that I really really trust.) So while I have a good number of friends on Facebook and contacts on LinkedIn, I won’t be leveraging them right now for building buzz for my web sites. I may need to rethink that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.
Early impressions of Twitter: I will need to figure out the lingo and morays of the tool. There are probably tips and tricks that I need to discover and master. I find the search for people to follow is a bit difficult since you can’t do it by category or tag.
Darren Rowse at Problogger has an interesting caution in building your Twitter following:
The other key part of your network is how relevant it is and how focused it is upon the topic that you’re doing promotions on. For example – I see some people on Twitter running competitions to build their follower numbers in a way that just brings in any follower that they can. The problem with this is that they end up with a large but unfocused network.
Let’s be blunt: I am using Twitter to follow people with like interests in the hopes that they will also follow me because I have similar interets. It is a bit stalkery, I admit. I would never add random people in Facebook or LinkedIn. But for some reason, this behaviour is expected and condoned.
I’ll keep you posted on my Twitter antics. Hell, you’ll probably see a widget on the sidebar in a couple of days.
Oh and by the way: Please follow me on Twitter:
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I am a bit addicted to twitter too, at least that is what my husband says. I’ve found it to be useful in making the first connection. I’ve meet some amazing people via twitter that I now talk to offline.