I spend a lot of time each day with Twitter, both as a user and as a trainer of the tool to others. What’s amazing is that it’s a tool that’s not easy to explain, and yet when people get it, they GET it.
Before we move forward, take a look at some of my posts (@jdcoffman) and let me know what you notice first.
- Is it how many followers I have?
- Is it how many people I follow?
- Is it my profile information?
- Is it the messages that I post?
My guess is that you noticed the timeline first, but did you notice any trends?
- How often do I tweet? (a tweet is a Twitter message)
- What do I tweet?
- Do I mostly write original content?
- Or do I mostly reply to other people’s posts?
Now those are mostly rhetorical questions, but I think they’re important. It gives you a better idea of how you can use the tool as well. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t follow all of my own best practices that I teach although I should. Twitter for me is a very personal experience – despite these personal thoughts being blasted to over a thousand people instantly.
When I first started Twittering there weren’t many rules and commons behaviors yet, we were all trying to figure this newfangled thing out (this was between 1 and 2 years ago)
Since you now have some backstory, let me now tell you tactically how I tweet and how I process the things other people tweet.
- Since Twitter for me is a personal tool mixed with my professional messages I primarily Twitter during the day about things that relate to what I’m working on or thinking about.
- Twhirl is open nearly all day on my work PC, individual messages don’t appear but it does pop up with a notice of how many messages have been loaded.
- Periodically (in between tasks) I read through between 25-50 tweets from the people I follow, picking up on the highlights and responding when I have something to contribute to the conversation.
- On the bus on the ride into work, and on the way home I fire up Twitterfon on my iPhone and read through the big list it downloads (often 500 or more tweets in about 15 minutes).
- When replies to my Tweets come through, I’m typically able to respond within an hour or two unless its the middle of the night.
What’s your workflow for dealing wih the constant stream of Tweets?
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