Introducing Eric to Twitter over the last few days has refreshed my own introductory experience in my mind. Twitter is one of those “no guidelines” tools where folks can meander around deciding how they want to use it in their own way.
Some people adhere quite strictly to answering the “What am I going” question, but those folks don’t end up creating very interesting content and they don’t stay on my friends list long.
I much prefer the people that use Twitter to:
- make snarky comments
- preview or follow up on their blog posts
- post funny quotes
- talk about interesting things they are working on
- point out new cool stuff
basically – something that is either entertaining or informative. And yes, I realize that this list is entirely subjective.
Folks that post tweets like:
Lunch
won’t stay in my friends list for long.
Twitter is sort of like a mailing list in that you should think about the attention you are taking from others by posting to it. If you follow a simple “I’d be willing to be interrupted by this” standard, I think that’s a pretty good compass.
Just one man’s opinion. Share yours in the comments.
10 points for the title “tweetin’ right”
I’ve been guilty as charged. But I think I also post some of the good stuff. This posted helped solidify my thinking on why I even run Twitterific on my desktop, besides “it’s kinda neat”. I’m a convert. I won’t tweet about the mundane, more use it to take a jab or two at someone or introduce my friends to something they might not otherwise see. come to think of it, that’s what i’ve been getting the most out of from using it so far. thanks for helping me think it through.
I think the “mundane” can be endured as long as it isn’t the bulk of the tweets from an individual. Sometimes some of the “mundane” posts give insight into the personality of a person you are following that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
I concur – anything of this sort is necessarily speaking in generalizations.
Once or twice a day I will put something mundane just to give that insight if someone wants it (like my RL friends).
Now that everyone is watching twittervision, it’s much more fun to throw out snarky comments and maybe pimp your own stuff (like my podcast) just a little.
No need to be obnoxious about it, but it’s there so why not?
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Agreed! Personally, I want to hear the twitt’s personality through their comments. MSN / IM already takes care of the “lunch”, “away”, statuses pretty well.
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Good points above. You want real stuff worth reading in posts and not buckets of spam or article links.