I was not impressed much with orkut when I was introduced to it years ago. Networking was all very fine, but somehow it appeared to be not my idea of making friends. So I stopped visiting orkut altogether. In the recent years, my interest was caught by blogs (the reading and writing of them). And in most of the blogs I read, I came across the inevitable “Follow me on twitter” link. I refused to be impressed, I told myself “Twitter is like orkut, I am not going to be captivated by it”. But there came a day when I decided to give Twitter a try and then decide what to decide about it – it somehow sounded different from orkut and other sites. Thus was born twitter.com/jean_blore. Then came a problem. I did not know many twitterers, so I sat around wondering, what next. I tried posting a few lines on “What I am doing now” but there was no one to read me 🙂
My wanderings among the tweets of others (who have 100+, 500+ and 1000+ followers) made me wonder, is anyone really reading all these messages coming from their infinite network of friends? Apparently they do, because I see replies, and if I take the trouble of switching between the tweets of two users, I can manage to comprehend an entire conversation! None of which is my business of course, but since they are in the public domain, I am free to read if I so wish.
What a bore.
The only benefit, if I may say so, that I found in my experiments with Twitter is something called twitterfeed, which scans my blog (RSS) every few hours and feeds my new posts as my tweets, to the benefit of anyone who strays into my tweet-domain by mistake. But since no one reads me on twitter, it’s of no use anyway.
I used to feel the same way about twitter. Lots of chatter and very little people actually listening. Then after many months of dragging my feet I "got it".
The best way to use twitter is to follow people in your space (or in some cases spaces) of interest. In my case those are Beer, MMA, and Social Media / Marketing.
See the thing is twitter, despite what people think, is less about tweeting and more about listening. Who is in your space? What are they talking about? You find something interesting? – Then @ reply with your two cents!
The key is not to just follow anyone. Start with a small group of people you find interesting, look at who they follow, use tools like wefollow and twitter search to find the rest. Then – interact. The rest takes care of itself.
@cbjerrisgaard
Thanks, @cbjerrisgaard. I have not totally given up on twitter yet. I do visit and walk around reading(listening to) what others say. Maybe, as you said, I will get the hang of it after a while!