I have been up in the air about Twitter ever since joining several months ago. In the beginning it was purely a promotional tool for me as I blogged about here. I used twitterfeed to have my blog update automatically and my Etsy listings. Occasionally I would chirp in with a random comment or two. I had around 400 followers at the beginning of the week just by following people back who followed me and occasionally following people whose blog I read. But this week I decided to give it the old college try to see if I could discover what everyone else loved about it. I also set a goal of having 1000 followers by the end of the week so that I would stop feeling like I was talking to the air. Well, I breezed by that goal yesterday and am now rapidly approaching 1,500.
I managed to reach my goal by following lots and lots of people. That can be time consuming but I just found someone like minded and creative and followed all of their followers. I'll admit I mostly followed other women since I obviously feel like that is my target but if a dude follows me I will follow him back. After a few days I went through all of the people and unfollowed the ones that had not returned the favor and followed me back. Some people think that it is rude to unfollow someone for not following you back, but I personally think it is rude to not return the follow, if you follow my reasoning. If you are trying to build up numbers you will have to eventually thin the herd since once you get to 2000 people that you follow Twitter will not let you follow anymore until you have an equal number of followers. This paragraph may have broken a record for the most uses of the word follow ever recorded!
So did I waste my time? I don't think so. I have actually decided that twitter doesn't suck. It is one more way to waste some time and unwind on-line. It is a pretty valuable marketing tool to have in your arsenal I believe, although the verdict is still out on whether any sales will result from it. It can also nice to be able to connect with people albeit in a superficial and small way. For example, I had a scary incident at work yesterday. I had a student verbally assault me and slam my door so hard that it knocked the pictures off my wall. I, of course, reported it to my supervisor but since I didn't even get his name there wasn't much to be done. I recanted the story to several of my colleagues but I was still worked up about it. Since we were busy I obviously had to get on with my day but I took a minute and went on Twitter and tweeted about it. Somehow putting it out there into the world in 140 characters or less made me feel better. I had a number of people reply to me which also gave me some of that release that I needed.
Do I think that Twitter is for everyone, no. But I'm glad that I'm building up those connections and becoming part of the community, how about you?
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