Twitter Roundup – One Month In
Magpie Heaven
If Twitter is anything, it is lots of information in a fast moving environment. Picture a revolving door in a busy shopping mall; as varied as the folks who pass through it and constantly changing. Other adjectives: interesting, colourful, amusing, random & enlightening. It’s a lot of fun to see what’s coming through the ‘tweetvine’ & to follow the various links. It makes me feel a little bit like a magpie with piles of neat shiny objects to go after. The challenge for me is that I don’t have ‘extra’ time. My time is tightly allocated and very much in demand. So how do I get the best use out of Twitter? There needs to be a balance between the magpie attraction and the usefulness/direct relevance of the information I find. Like any social networking site, I need to keep track of my time by quickly valuing the links and contacts I encounter.
Building relationships
Twitter has been a fascinating way to make initial contact with a large number of people that have similar business values/interests. I can see their tweets (and they see mine) and we can both decide whether;
a) the other person is someone I want to know, and
b) whether they have value to offer.
Then we can get in touch. So far, people I’ve ‘met’ on twitter, I’ve followed up with by email, Linked In, their websites, etc. The trick here is to ensure that I am the opposite of the magpie. I need to make sure I am collecting only that shiny bits that are valuable at the end of the day and not just picking up connections and contacts that may be fun but distracting.
Automatic Refollow
With Twitter, you can set up your account to automatically refollow any other peep who choses to follow you. Alternatively, you may prefer to opt out of this as some people treat twitter like a popularity contest; gathering up as many followers as they can, rather than as a B2B social networking environment. There are two avenues of thought on this and it depends on your purpose for being on Twitter. If you choose the automatic refollow, you need to later review the followers to make sure they have your interests at heart (similar purpose), otherwise your ‘tweetstream’ will be overloaded with useless & time wasting micro-blog posts. Which do you choose?
So Far
Time spent to date: roughly 21 hours (time is decreasing now that I ‘get it’)
Questions I have:
1) Do people really try to keep up with all the flow of information?
2) What are the best third party tools to use with Twitter to save time?
3) What’s with the ego thing of checking how many followers I have?
ROI: Introductions & connections have proven to be advantagous. I have useful information to send prospects, have been introduced to HARO, and have located a network of international experts in a variety of fields. So far so good. Time will tell if the usefulness of this ‘tweetvine’ takes root or fades out like a spring annual in my garden.
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