A while back I was implored by Grant Griffiths, my social media Obi-Wan Kenobi, to get on Twitter. I signed up and followed a few people, and I’ll be honest: I didn’t get it.
Now I get it. It took me a while to learn the ropes, but gradually I began to appreciate the appeal of Twitter. Once I followed enough people and enjoyed their reciprocal following, I came to understand that Twitter is a massive, real-time conversation happening all over the world at once. It’s an incredibly rich informative and social experience.
Some tools have helped me leverage Twitter’s capabilities. I discovered Summize, which became search.twitter.com, to look for mention of our product in the Twittersphere. After experimenting with several Twitter clients, I downloaded TweetDeck, which makes the experience much more enjoyable and usable.
Taking a look at our Tweets, I’ve classified them into distinct groups:
2. Retweeting something of interest.
3. Asking a question that may spark dialog.
4. Responding to a question.
5. Promoting a blog entry.
6. Promoting a business initiative.
7. Disseminating information about deployments & server maintenance affecting our customers.
8. Sending out training reminders.
9. Having fun. Twitter is, after all, a social network.
2 Comments
Let’s not forget asking for help (or a Treo charger) and *poof* there it is! lol
Great post – although I do not agree that anyone should use TweetDeck – along with being “beta”, the Adobe Air and bit.ly TOS are not something I feel comfortable with – but then again, I HATE being marketed to or having my digital doings tracked.
I call myself a natural twitter user – I log in when I want and read what’s going on. No ads in for me. If I miss some of the conversation – that’s ok. I don’t think it was meant for users to catch everything anyway. You certainly don’t catch all the conversations going on in the “real” world.
Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents re: twitter. Glad you made it back safe and sound.
Thanks for the mention Larry. But I just pushed, you are the one who took twitter and ran with it and use it right. Way to go.
I agree, TweetDeck is a must for me to manage my twitter community. I could not do on twitter what I do without it.