Saturday, June 19, 2010

thoughts on twitter

I've been thinking about Twitter a bit lately. Kind of a love-hate I have going there. It would be more accurate to say that I love Twitter and hate what many people are attempting to do with it as it gains popularity and thus influence. A couple thoughts that keep rattling around in my head:

1. Twitter is for your real friends, not the masses you befriend on facebook. Everyday, a few new people follow me, but it's not because they know me or care at all what I have to say. They follow anyone who tweets keywords that are linked to products or services they sell.

2. Having more followers does not make you popular. Just like having more friends on facebook does not make you popular. Popularity is achieved by investing in, adding value to and loving people. Clicking the word "follow" on a web page does not count as investment. Twitter is for you and your tribes. People you love and influence and those whom you are loved and influenced by.

3. Following an exorbitant number of people does not help you, even if you do it with the best of intentions. Can you really follow 10,977 people and have any idea what's going on with even 1% of them? You are a human, not a server harvesting information.

4. If you tweet constantly, you're not getting your message across, you're just annoying people. I regularly stop following people who have some really great things to say. The problem? They say them way too often. Some notable examples: John Maxwell, Rick Warren, Ed Stetzer. I'll read their books and blogs and learn like crazy, but I can't stomach these guys on Twitter.

There are a few more, but super-long blog posts are also not a good idea, so I'm done here. Of course, these are only my opinions. I would love to hear yours.

2 comments:

Hubbell said...

I've found Twitter to be a great news feed...there are several newspapers and news blogs I try to keep up with and twitter is a great tool for me to stay aware of what is in the news. I rarely, if ever "tweet". I use Facebook as my tool for keeping up with friends and committed to not be a "friend" with anyone on Facebook unless I actually would know them by name if I walked into a room. I think it is interesting how we all use these social networking tools differently. Of course, you hit it on the head...all these things are tools, not our personalities.

Jason Fitch said...

yeah, good point. I see facebook as the place to connect with the masses, so to speak. Seems that there are many different uses for the same tool.