BaffledBlabber

Twitter! Tweet! TweetDeck! I’m So Confused!

As you may be able to guess, I have recently begun “twittering” (www.twitter.com).  I avoided it for a long time because I just could not see how sending little messages or “tweets” about what I was doing with my day would lead anywhere. On the contrary, I have to say that I am enjoying my Twitter experience!

Twitter has so many people on it with so many interests, backgrounds and intentions that I think it would be difficult to consider it useless.  People post all kinds of information, including bald-faced promotion, product announcements, blog posting announcements, what’s cooking for dinner, what the dog just did, favorite quotes, travel ditties, and an amazing amount of just about anything else. It can quickly get overwhelming.

At first, I thought I would use it only for business.  I am pretty focused on information dissemination to the startup crowd (hence this blog), and constitutes most of my “tweets” to date.  When I actually read my own tweets however, I realized how boring and one-sided I appeared to be.  Now, I am naturally humor-challenged and can be overly focused, but gawd, I didn’t even find myself interesting, so how why would anyone else want to read what I had to say?

The more I scouted around, the more I understood that Twitter is not just about announcements, but getting into the whole big conversation. I have loosened up a bit and have recently posted links to some very funny or touching YouTube entries that my husband sends to me, I sent condolences to a woman whose dog is dying, and I posted a request for contact with people who show dogs to help me find local shows.  I hope I am a little more interesting and connecting a little better now, enough to keep my followers happy.

Twitter works by following and replying to the tweets of others, and having others follow and reply to your tweets.  I find building these relationships is the time-consuming part.  Twitter is pretty basic in its construction, and its help files and search functions are not as advanced as they could be.  Searching terms and finding people that you would like to follow can take a while unless you only want to connect with others who are tweeting about a very narrow topic, such as the ethnomusicology of speakers of Frisian.  You and everyone else can follow and unfollow at any time, so who you follow and who follows you is pretty flexible.

It is easy to get from tweets to participants’ web pages and blogs, especially specific blog postings bout which they tweet.  Maybe the strength of Twitter is not necessarily in the tweets, but in the connections you can make with websites and blogs that interest you.

Probably more than other social networking activities, I think Twitter, although the quickest and easiest, requires the most strategic planning.  I found a woman today whose business is to plan social networking strategies built around Twitter. Since I don’t yet know that much about using Twitter strategically, I was able to quickly get to her blog and bookmark it for later reading.

In addition to the tweets, Twitter allows you to personalize your home page.  You can find templates for both PhotoShop and PowerPoint all over the web, as well as backgrounds other people have designed.  I love looking at people’s homepage backgrounds as much as I like the tweeting, actually.   I want the little box on the left side of the screen!

Before I started tweeting, I found a couple of helpful articles on Biznik that discussed Twitter.  You can search “twitter” in the Biznik articles and find them.  I recommend finding some preliminary information before you jump in with both feet, just to get familiar with the idea.  After that, and if you determine that Twitter is useful for you, the sky’s the limit!

I almost forgot–you can find me on Twitter @CluelessEnt.