Everyone’s talking about Tweeting these days. Over the past week, I’ve seen quite a few of my blogger friends jump on the bandwagon. In the last two days, I’ve started following TC Lin(Poagao), Ashish Lin of Tumbling in Taiwan and MJ Klein aka The New Hampshire Bushman. I’ve included their Twitter links here in case you’re interested in seeing what they have to offer the world of Twitter.
MJ wrote an interesting article today about Twitter, and I found my reply getting longer and longer with each passing second. I decided to add my comments to this article, which was started a week ago. Here’s my take on how best to use Twitter’s services.
Frankly put, Twitter is what you make it. It can be about your everyday musings. It can be used to promote your blog. You can post interesting URL’s and create discussion over them. You can promote your friends. For all you expats out there, join a Twitter group like the China Twitterati or Expatacular and follow what’s happening with expats and locals throughout China and the rest of the world. If you’re looking for followers, following a group like The China Twitterati List is definitely the fastest way to find them.
Twitter is a constant flow of information. Some of it is completely useless. Some of it is informative. Some of it is funny and some of it is down-right ridiculous.
I like following the big guys like @mashable, @problogger, and @scobleizer because the tech information coming from these guys is instantaneous. They tweet from major tech conferences around the world. It’s all in the moment. You are privy to information before it’s officially released. You won’t get a faster update anywhere else.
I’ve found a really neat group of people who share one or several interests with me, be it travel-related, food-related, photography-related or tech-related. Twitter has opened up my world. I’ve found a whole new slew of friends. I’ve noticed a significant increase in my traffic and best of all, these visitors are social networkers, which means they love to leave comments! Twitter is one of the best website marketing tools around as far as I’m concerned, provided you put in the time to get to know other users.
My first Twitter friend was Mark Forman aka bbluesman. I’ve found out more about him in the last several months then I learned at the party I met him at in October last year. My guilty little secret is that I actually stole a bunch of his friends when I first signed on, because I wasn’t sure how to use the service. Since then, I’ve found out that Mark is a great judge of character. His friends were most welcoming and helped me navigate the world of Twitter with ease.
Understanding how Twitter works can take a little time to get used to, but I hope you come to like it as much as I do.
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i just can’t get over the dumb names that marketing jocks come up with. “twitter” deserves a slap!
[full disclosure: I'm a believer!]
Twitter provides a more fast-paced social network than any of the other offerings. Plus, while sites like Facebook require you to login and have an account to view activity, Twitter is open to the public. No other services offer than level of accessibility.
The format is dead easy for an RSS aggregator, paving the way for many add-on apps. These apps, unlike those on FB, are viral in their appeal, not just in their design.
As I explained to others when I first “got it,” Twitter is like a chat program that saves your conversations. Speed of IM, memory of email. And it can be accessed from a variety of media … laptop, text, voice.
Great post, Carrie. I’ll check out those lists.
“My guilty little secret is that I actually stole a bunch of his friends when I first signed on, because I wasn’t sure how to use the service. Since then, I’ve found out that Mark is a great judge of character. His friends were most welcoming and helped me navigate the world of Twitter with ease.”
Well if you call stealing what is open and on the internet guess you’re guilty as charged. We all start that way by the way. No reinvented wheels here thank you. To be great judge of character I’d have to be one,err, or have some or…
Peder, any of the “real” IM platforms will save conversations. Twitter is a broadcast system for very short messages that you want a lot of people to see. i’m a blogger and so i have a site for broadcasting but i prefer to do so in detail. the social networking aspects are moot for me. i see absolutely no use for Facebook (and a lot of possible exposure) and dubious uses for Twitter. it’s still in testing mode for me though. it seems good for jokes at least.
MJ,
LOL. I thought the same thing when I heard about Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku. I mean, really, who thinks up these names? But, I’ve found over the last few months that Twitter (as stupid as it sounds) seems to be quite an appropriate name.
Stevo,
Hope to see you hanging out some day soon. It was slow going for me at first until I found my groove.
Peder,
Don’t I know it. You’re Twitter-Fam! Thanks for offering your insight.
[...] member of my blog roll (right hand column, list of other blogs I read). Meet Carrie. This first post talks about her experience with Twitter. This second provides an account of how Twitter helped [...]