Twitter Apprentice

In February I wrote a blog post about my very first experiences with Twitter. I really didn't get the point of Twitter then, but decided to hang in there, and see if, with time, I would come to see what the appeal of Twitter is.

Now, a few months later, I'm slowly getting there. I have a whole bunch of followers and am also following quite a few people myself. So where do you go to find interesting people to follow? Here are some tips:

- Use a directory, for example http://wefollow.com/ or http://www.twittergids.nl/ (for Dutch Twitter users)
- When you're following somebody, have a look at their twitter profile to see which people they are following. Perhaps they are interesting for you to follow as well
- Make sure to follow MrTweet on Twitter. He will send you tweets with suggestions for people to follow

When you start tweeting, you will find that people will start following you as well. It really helps if you fill out the short bio on your Twitter Settings, so that people with similar interests can find you.

It seems to be good netiquette to follow somebody back as a thank you for them following you. I did this diligently in the beginning, but have stopped now. Unfortunately there are a lot of people on twitter who abuse your kindness this way, whose sole interest seems to be to get as many followers as possible, but who will never really interact with you. This has probably been the one thing about twitter that has annoyed me the most.

So, when somebody follows you, check out their profile, bio & tweets before deciding to follow them back. That way you'll have at least some idea as to what that person is about and whether they are likely to interact with you or not.

I think the folks-that-just-want-thousands-of-followers-but-won't-interact issue is one of the major reasons why so many people quit using Twitter within the first month. It really is very annoying when that happens, while you genuinely want to interact with your followers and those you follow. But you play an important role in making that happen as well. Interaction involves you and at least one other person after all. So in order to interact, you will have to act as well. So tweet! And @reply to messages from the people you follow. And RT (retweet) any interesting messages you read from the people you follow. If you don't say anything, it's a bit unrealistic to expect that others will reach out to you. Unless you're a celebrity of course...

Anyway, that's it for this Twitter Blog. I'm also working on a blog about using Twitter for learning purposes, but am still researching it. In the meantime, you can find me here on Twitter if you like to interact! Happy Tweeting!

Twitter Newbie

Over the past few months I've been hearing more and more about Twitter. After expanding my use of LinkedIn, Facebook and Hyves I decided to find out more about Twitter as well. Where the social networking sites are pretty intuitive, I found Twitter much harder to get to grips with.

Oh signing up is easy enough, and Twitter tries to help by giving little hints as to what to do next. So you have to find some people you wish to follow and they have the same little tool you find on the social networking sites to search through your email address books to find people in your existing network who are also on Twitter. In my case there were only 2 people also on Twitter. This surprised me... isn't Twitter supposed to be this big hype that EVERYONE is using?? Apparently not...

Next I struggled and am still struggling to find others to follow. The Twitter suggestions don't really mean a lot to me and I wish Twitter would offer categories to search in, for example users from the Netherlands, or users who work or have an interest in learning technologies... But no, that's not possible.

So right now I'm resorting to occasionally hitting the 'everyone' button on the Twitter website. This shows you 'tweets' that have been recently made by all twitter users. I'm browsing through them to find interesting tweets, and thus people I might wish to follow.

So far I've not seen what the big fuzz is all about with regards to Twitter. I think it's only interesting if you can find the right people to follow. However there isn't a lot of help or support or tools that will assist you in finding the right people. If I'm wrong, please enlighten me!