Twitter wisdom

How to find new people to follow in twitter?

0. Visit your friend’s profile pages and check whom they are following.

1. Check to whom your friends are sending @ replies often. These are active, interesting people.

2. Now, Go to http://search.twitter.com and search for things of your interest. Select profiles with interesting content.

From all the above profiles,

* Select profiles with followers / following ratio 1 or more. The more the better.

* Select profiles with lot of links in the updates. Links mean information.

Remember: The number of your followers isn’t that important. The number of people you follow, their quality of tweets is important. The more the people and better they are, you are better informed.

Twitter Syntax

* To reply to someone start the tweet with @someone

* To retweet what someone said, start the tweet with RT @someone

* To link some topic to its search page in twitter, use #sometopic anywhere in your tweet

* To directly send a message to someone, start your tweet with d someone

Twitter Time management:

Twitter failed to give a statutory warning that it is highly addictive. I am already seeing many of the reticent bloggers spending a lot of time in Twitter. True that twitter induces conversation by design. But still…

* Don’t keep a Twitter Desktop / browser app or Twitter website open all the time. The notifications, refreshings will suck your time.

* Switch off the followers notifications or send it to your secondary email.

* If you get annoyed by @ replies between your friends, you can switch them off from the settings. But these replies only make the place lively, informative, interesting. You will find new people to follow.

* Do add a clear profile picture. Helps your friends to identify you easily.

* It’s best open once / twice a day, read the tweets, reply and close it down.

* Read the tweets in reverse chronological order. It makes more sense.

* Don’t flood with tweets. Anything more than 10 a day, people are starting to get annoyed.

Twitter as Microblogging platform:

If you are seriously considering Twitter as a Microblogging platform and caring less and less for your regular blogs, think twice now. I find Twitter great to stay in touch with friends, get help, social networking but I rate it very poorly as a Microblogging platform. Microblogging is not just being about short.

Why?

* Twitter is unreliable. Goes down many times. I would like to blog when I like not when Twitter is fine.

* You don’t own the content. Right now, you can’t export your tweets to another service.

* Content accessibility is blocked in many ways. They cut down the archives after mere 5-10 pages. I have 1000+ tweets gone for ever 🙁

* Your readers need to register, understand twitter before they respond to you.

* Comments / replies are spread over and don’t make sense many times. It is confusing for which tweet you get the reply.

* The 140 character limit can be unnecessarily limiting.

* The TinyURLs don’t help you understand where you are gonna land.

* No way to find related content as there are no tags and categories.

* No audio, visual treat as you can’t embed anything.

* Very Poor RSS feed service.

So, what is Twitter best for?

* To help, respond to your friends with @ replies. Whether you like it or not, the crowd is there. Stay in touch.

* Ask for help. Twitter crowd by design and habit, responds faster than light.

* Anything you would like to write but would not care to archive.

* To follow news, trends.

* Shed your online image and be just friends with people.

And that’s all the twitter wisdom I got in 8 months of tweeting !

Also see:

Twitter etiquette – Do’s and Don’ts