twitter, huh?

My husband asked me yesterday, "Why the hell do you use that thing?" (meaning Twitter). So I decided to write down why I use it and what I've learned from it so far...

First of all, a good article: http://blog.mrtweet.net/twitter-law-of-reciprocity

Second of all, my Twitter profile: www.twitter.com/jessicashortall

I should start by saying that I by and large am building my own little Twitterverse around people interested in social innovation.

The main thing I have learned over the past few weeks is that Twitter is action- and interest- oriented. It’s about utility. For me, Tweeting has/should have almost nothing in common with Facebook status updates: the audiences are completely separate. FB is for friends, and I post stupid/useless information. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter just because we’re friends. I am developing a kind of rule where I only tweet stuff that will have at least one of the following outcomes:

1. 
   
   It might be RT’d (because it is interesting/useful enough to be retweeted)




2. 
   
   It asks for people to do something they are able to do – introduce me to someone, send me a link, look smart, etc (A tweet like this might go: “Looking for experts in small business economic development. Can you intro me?”)
   


3. 
   
   It will amuse my Tweeps (This is fully dependent on you knowing who is following you and having kind of an ongoing dialogue going)
   


4. 
   
   It will create a conversation amongst the people who follow both me and the person I am tweeting about – kind of a more complex one. If I see a tweet from someone in Austin, I kind of have a sense of who else might be following them. By replying to their tweet publicly you can sometimes start a conversation amongst interesting people.



5. 
   
   It will build my general profile & personality in the Twitterverse. It should contribute to the story about myself that I want people on Twitter to know. That doesn’t mean it has to be completely focused – I do sometimes just Tweet what I’m up to, or a link to a news article, if it’s interesting enough. But those things also build me a 3-D profile. There are people I follow who I’ve never met in person, but now we have moved on to sharing emails and being “friends” because they or I seemed interesting and cool and useful enough to get in touch with. So, it will make me look cool/smart/interesting/knowledgeable/worth knowing.

Unless it meets one of the criteria above, I never tweet a “what I’m doing right now” update.
Now, on to Retweeting. Couple of recent observations:

1. 
   
   For me, Retweeting should still fill one of the three goals above.




2. 
   
   Twitter is about building social capital. If you RT someone’s tweet they are likely to remember and be grateful and pay more attention to your tweets. Also, it’s a nice thing to do. You should never expect a direct or even indirect ROI out of being generous on Twitter, but the irony is that being generous is the only way to get something out of it. So it’s selfish-unselfish.



3. 
   
   I will sometimes RT stuff that has little/no interest to me directly, if I feel like my twitterverse might find it useful.
   

In general, I think there is a chicken-and-egg situation which makes Twitter hard to really wrap your head around, and then once it clicks it jumps the value of Twitter up significantly. For me, it’s about slowly finding and building a community of followees (which I control 100%) and followers (which I don’t fully control) that I can build a sense of. What are the interests among this group of people, some of whom are connected to each other, some of whom are not? What resources might they have at hand, or 1 or 2 degrees removed? (I recently tweeted asking for opinions on box vs “tumbler” composters, and one of my tweeps introduced me to his wife, who recommended the best product – fyi it’s a tumbler) How can I be valuable to them?

And finally, I don’t follow everyone who follows me, and I unfollow people who annoy me. Like, people who tweet all day long, or whose tweets are boring/not useful/don’t follow my criteria above, or who will tweet 5 things within 2 minutes, which is not how you are supposed to do it at all.

Now, if you're reading this and you use Twitter, tell me what you know.