My week of tweeting
I figured I’d take the Twitter plunge despite my skepticism. I’ve been at it a week to help promote FinReg21.com our new media property on financial services regulation and its reform. Here’s a preliminary report. The good news is that it is fun and easy. Knocking out 140 character comments is pretty easy and the platform is easy to work with. And I quickly got followers. It was amazing. All of a sudden I’m getting notifications of random people I’ve never heard of following me. It all happened very quickly.
The bad news so far is that most of the people who are following me seem to be advertisers (Barclay’s Wealth–sure I’m going to give my money to them) and people, who based on their tweets, couldn’t possibly have any interest in financial services or my thoughts on it. My conjecture is that people are looking for followers just to say they have them and are contacting me because they hope I will follow them. If that’s a lot of what’s happening on Twitter I don’t see it as being very interesting as a real communication method. But I have an open mind. The power of Twitter in Iran has impressed me with its power as a broadcast medium. So I’m going to keep tweeting—for now.
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David,
My experience based on six months of huge activity on Twitter is that Twitter is a great place to learn a lot about your hobby, business or just about anything else especially if you use the Twitter search function. It’s a real time search engine.
You can make some good friends on Twitter if you are persistent and really try hard. Otherwise, you can’t. ;P
Stay with Twitter for a while. Explore the search at http://search.twitter.com . Know that just about every DM you receive will be SPAM. If you expect to market your business on Twitter, I think you are wasting your valuable time.
I am not being a contrary, just a realist.
I’m following you too David. Stick with it!
Stick with it David - been enjoying your Tweets. Our experience with Twitter has been very beneficial.
Jim Issokson
MasterCard
Welcome to Twitter David. Twitterspam is a real problem and I believe something they must address from a usabilty perspective. They have not transitioned well from an early adopter tool largely free of spam to a mass market communication platform full of all the problems of mass market commuication tools. For the time being, you’ll learn to ignore it like the rest of us.
What you will also find (if you use a URL shortener) is that Twitter will drive a significant amount of traffic to your blog.