Jeff Lail

Like Facebook, Twitter is a social networking tool.  If you’re not familiar with Twitter, please check out Twitter.com.

The website was designed around text messaging, limiting it’s users to postings of 140 characters.  Users are allowed to post short posts, called microblogging, that they share in the public pool.

When you join Twitter, you are also allowed to follow people and people are allowed to follow you.  When you follow someone, you receive their updates and they receive yours when they follow you.

Twitter, like any other piece of technology, can either be a tool or a time drain.  Here are some of the problems I’ve seen with Twitter so far that can make it in to a time drain.

1) Following too many people creates an extreme inundation of wall posts.  At one point, I was only following 50 people.  Believe it or not, that is a small number of followers…many people follow thousands.  But even with my very limited number that I was following, my twitter wall would fill up in a matter of a few hours.  I don’t have the time or desire to spend all day on Twitter keeping up with other’s posts.

2) There is a LOT of stuff on Twitter that is completely pointless.  I don’t really care whether a person I barely know is eating at McDonald’s or is going to take a shower.  When your wall fills up so rapidly and half of it’s pointless or a couple people conversing about randomness, it begins to make Twitter pointless.

One way to eliminate this clutter is to follow less people.  But this creates problems, at least with closer friends.  Not following someone who follows you is seen as kind of a rude thing to do.  It’s like someone asking you out on a date, and you simply don’t say anything.  Not cool.

I think the way to get around this is to try to make your posts more interesting and try to develop community as best as possible with those who follow you.

One way to do this is to post questions to the community.  Think of Twitter as a crowd of people that are listening to every word you say and are ready to provide feedback.  Anything that you are working on can be posed to the crowd as a question, allowing the crowd to respond and give feedback.  I’ve tried this twice recently, once asking a question about a presentation I was doing on “running better meetings”, and the other time I asked “how do you combat those who have a resistance to technology due to fear”.  Both questions illicited several inciteful responses from my small group of followers.

The other way is to make your tweets interesting to read.  I get to do a lot of fairly interesting things because of my job, so I try to post something about what’s going on, why I’m doing it and then provide a link in case they want to read more.  I have no way to gauge how effective this is, other than most of these posts get some response as well.

I think this is an emerging technology.  But as with any technology, especially on the internet, it is a nice way to attempt to connect to a community that you may not meet on the street and let them know what you do and market yourself.