Today I reached a bit of a Twitter milestone. The community of followers I’ve been building up on Twitter since early last year reached the 1,000 mark. Firstly, I want to say a big thanks to everyone who follows my tweets.
Those of you who do follow me on Twitter will know that I tweet a lot, I’ve become known for it it seems. I see people talking about it on Twitter, and it’s come up in the odd blog post and podcast lately. I make no apologies for it, as many of my tweets are part of conversations with people, not one way micro-blogging. I follow a lot of people, so there is a lot of conversation.
Twitter is really about conversation for me. People don’t have to follow me if they don’t like the way I use Twitter, that’s fine. I like to think I bring value to the conversation, but if people think I don’t, they can hit that ‘Remove’ button. That’s the good thing about Twitter, you have a lot of control.
I’m often asked how I can follow so many people and not get overwhelmed by the amount of tweets coming in. Well, as my network has grown, I’ve come to rely on the ‘Replies” page quite a lot. It’s easy to keep up with conversations when the replies to you are separated off into their own timeline.
I also use Terraminds to search for my username, as the replies page doesn’t catch the @jjprojects replies that aren’t the first word in the tweet. I feel it’s important to at least read all the replies to me, if people have gone to the effort of replying.
I like starting conversations. I’ll also dive into existing conversations when the mood strikes and time allows. If I think I’ve missed something interesting or important, I’ll simply ask my community about it.
People use Twitter in different ways. Some people can’t stand the thought of following as many people as I do, some follow many more. Some people don’t make conversation, it’s not what they want out of it.
If you use Twitter, how or why do you use it? I’d be interested to know. If you don’t use it yet, why not give it a go?
