Awww, why'd you have to go and do that?
While I am a rule follower in my daily life, when it comes to twitter I don't follow too many rules.
When I first started tweeting, there were rules such as only tweet seven times day, don't tweet photos of your breakfast (lunch, dinner, etc), and there was the whole Follow Friday thing.
I love to tweet. And some days, I tweet a lot more than I do on others but I never feel like I'm tweeting too much. If you think I tweet too much, you should probably follow some more people so you don't think that anymore.
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| That's a lotta tweets! |
When I tweet photos of my food guess what happens? They are the most viewed photos of any that I tweet. This is ALWAYS the case. It turns out, people really do care what I eat or at least they are interested in seeing photos of it.
Back in my early twitter days, my friend
, posted a blog about the whole Follow Friday meme. It was really a great post that, sadly, he has taken down and can't find because I'd love to share it with you. It was the post that made me rarely ever participate in #FF or #FollowFriday.
Mostly, I was afraid of missing someone and hurting their feelings by not mentioning them on #FF. But Patrick's blog post gave me something rational to direct people to when I needed an explanation.
Now people probably just think I'm loopy. And they're probably right.
I think people are kind of getting away from doing the #FF thing with just lists of twitter handles and are gravitating more towards #FF mentions such as this one:
Lauri is the trophy wife of David Rottmayer. She enjoys reading, traveling, and spending time with her best friend (David). They live with "Boo Boo the Wonder Dog" in Oklahoma. Lauri and David have recently become grandparents to their amazing glambaby, Aniston. They met while serving in the United State Marine Corps and will soon be celebrating their 33rd Anniversary. Lauri can also be found on Twitter, her blog, and her website.
There are no rules. The people who told you there were rules were confusing their own GUIDELINES with rules.
ReplyDeleteEveryone has their own idea of "what Twitter is". There are a ton of people who think that it should be only a news service and that all personal tweets of any kind are "out of place". Those people really make me shake my head in disbelief.
I don't tweet much any more but when I do, I still tweet about what I feel like saying. Twitter is about YOU and what you want to talk about. If you want to talk about an amazing lunch, go ahead. There is a whole network of "foodies" on Twitter, just as there is on all of the other "social networks".
You don't have to make your content be something meaningful or deep or enlightening or "worthwile". You'll get better content in return if you do some of those things, but the point is to enjoy yourself.
As for follow friday, I don't do it and never have. It has always been a tradition that focuses on generating big numbers of followers. I never had any aspirations to win the numbers game (and I had problems keeping up with the few hundred people that I followed) so didn't and don't compile lists of people to follow. When I recommend someone as a general "follow this person" it's because that person is interesting and worthy, not because they put my name on a list and now I'm returning the favor.
I am wordy. That means that anyone who follows me on Twitter (or anywhere else) has to deal with that. I once had some person I had never heard of (which means he had just followed me because of someone's #FF or something, not because I had communicated with him in the past and we developed a relationship) tell me "Dude, write a blog entry. Don't spam tweets."
Laugh at it was all I could do, heh. I politely informed him that he was welcome to unfollow me at any time that he found my content to be too onerous to endure. ;)
That's the point in the end, really. There's not end-game that says that your goal is to acquire twenty-million followers and keep them all happy. That's losing sight of the point of the medium, which is communication. When you turn your tweetstream into a news stream and never bother actually interacting personally with your followers, in both directions, then you might as well just go do something else, in my opinion.
Go ahead and tweet about your lunch, your kids, or your lousy day or your favorite song. If I don't like it, I'll go follow someone else. It's no big deal. Same goes for anyone who follows me. If you don't want to hear about MMORPG's or you don't like epic-length tweet streams or you don't like blips in your tweets then feel free to unfollow me. With several million twitter users out there, it's silly to make following and unfollowing into something personal or to spend your energy either dictating to others on how they should communicate, or likewise letting others dictate to you how YOU should communicate.
The only way you're doing it wrong is when you're not having fun doing it. :-)
Thanks for the input, Slickriptide! I should have YOU do a guest post sometime.
ReplyDeleteYou get it, Slickriptide! I tweet for me and it makes me happy. No games, no innuendo, I'm pretty in your face. And honest. And if someone doesn't like it they can unfollow me. :-) Funny follow up: After I tweeted about my guest blog here on Doug's blog, I was followed by @guestblogit. So I decided to follow them and what did they reward me with? An auto DM asking me to like their facebook page. LOL! I unfollowed them. ;-)
ReplyDeleteHey, Doug! What happened with your son's game blog? I am embarassed to say that I looked once and then got wrapped up in life stuff and forgot to follow up on it.
ReplyDeleteYou probably don't want me to guest shot. If I'm writing something it's probably because I've got an opinion to spout on about. :-p