Turning Down the Twitter Volume
When I first signed up for Twitter, I didn’t have any idea how or why anyone would use it. Micro-blogging? 140 characters maximum? It seemed like another Web 2.0 fad, like podcasting, that I’d be skipping.
After discovering how many people were using the service, however, I got hooked. Twitter became a replacement for my Google Reader and I started using it to keep up with the blogs and articles that I fill my head with on a daily/weekly basis. I was following anyone and everyone in the automotive industry, seeking out OEMs, suppliers, and dealerships to see what they were saying and how they were using Twitter as a marketing tool. I’d get excited to login just to see if anyone had broken the Twitter code and discovered a way to maximize these 140 characters.
What I realized is that following too many people made it difficult to keep up with the people I genuinely wanted to follow. I was ‘following’ over 250 people/companies/blogs which made it impossible to read all of the content each of them were delivering. Some Twitters, like Guy Kawasaki, are following over 25,000 people, obviously not using Twitter the way that I like to. What volume of noise created by following everyone and anybody with a Twitter account became overwhelming and made the site not as useful and fun for me.
So…yesterday I turned down my Twitter volume and started to follow a key group of people whose opinions I value. After doing this, I’ve found that the quality and quantity of my Twitter conversations has increased. The Twitters I’m now ‘following’ are those that I can learn from and I feel this is why I’m going to continue to using the service.
A question was asked yesterday about ‘What is this Twitter thing all about?’. I think the answer is different for everybody. For me, it is an opportunity to share thoughts and ideas with a large group of people (in 140 characters or less). For others, it is a way to listen to a peer group and generate ideas. Some people use the search.twitter.com functionality as a real-time IM/newscast with the world, as has been seen with a recent Denver plane crash and the turmoil in Mumbai.
What I’d like to know is how do you use Twitter?
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