Sebbie on the Webbie

I’ve been actively using Twitter for about two weeks now. I’ve been reading blog posts about it, checked services, downloaded “Tweet Clients” and what not. Somehow, the short-worded world of Twitter didn’t really open up to me that easily. I tend to be wordy, as you know, so the 140 marks -limit really didn’t do it for me. But, I think I finally got the gist of it – in the bloggers point of view.

Frankly, if I had stayed on Twitter.com alone, I still wouldn’t get it. Twitter.com is very basic compared to all the services surrounding it. Who has time to hang out on one site all the time anyway? Not me – and I’m not doing anything that important. Twitter is supposed to keep you up-to-date to the minute, but who on Earth has time to stare at the public Twitter update stream to come up with something even remotely interesting? So I downloaded a couple of desktop Tweeting programs to make it easier to update and follow. But quite frankly, even that didn’t really get me much anywhere.

Then I found Tweetlater.com and their keyword alerts. It sends me an email summary of tweets that have certain keyword in them, every 4 hours. I can quickly read it through to see what people are saying right now about social networking for example. Most of the time, they don’t say anything that interesting. It only takes that one tweet though, that will spark your interest and get you somewhere. The thing is that the bulk of bloggers don’t say anything interesting or helpful either. Most of the time, they write the same stuff over and over – 10 steps to successful blogging, 13 great tutorials, 15 rules to great web design blah blah blah, heard it all before and wrote about it already. It takes you a lot longer to check if a blog has any useful information to you, or anything you’d find remotely entertaining, rather than read through a bunch of Tweets.

Sure, you may miss a great article on Twitter because of a badly structured tweet, but if the tweet is good, chances are that the blogger can actually write – something that you can’t take granted these days. Being witty and to the point in 140 marks or less is a good test for your self-expression skills.
You’ll also be able to quite quickly put your finger on the latest trends. For example, I have a keyword “Finland” on my keyword alert. It took me one summary to learn, that postcrossing is huge in Finland. About 70% of Tweets concerning Finland were about writing a postcard to Finland or receiving a postcrossing-card from Finland. (After I learned this, I told Tweetlater to ignore messages about cards thank you very much.)

During the last 2 weeks I found out that promoting your blog on Twitter is more effective than StumbleUpon – at least if you’re a small-timer like myself. Stumble relies on thumbs up and your readers stumbling your posts, while Twitter… You tweet it, and if you’re lucky (good) someone will retweet it, because it’s easy. It takes about half a second compared to properly stumbling it (for the first time). My advice: If you have those share-buttons on your blog and you had to choose only one, choose Twitter.

Another important thing to know as a blogger, is that you can automatically tweet your blog posts by using TwitterFeed. In addition, there are few services that will update your Twitter status, but a word of warning… Avoid loops! I went tweet-rss crazy myself, and added every feed I could think of to every service I could, and ended up having the same update appear first on Facebook, which updated Twitter, which updated Facebook, which updated Twitter… And so forth. You don’t want to annoy your followers by doing that! I was lucky nobody reported me as a spam bot before I realised what was happening!

The most awesome thing about Twitter is that it is actually very social. A lot of other social networks could easily just drop the “social” off and be more accurate. Because there’s nothing else to do on Twitter than send messages to people and read them, you won’t get side tracked by millions of applications and editing your profile all the time. How many of you confess to staring at their own profile page thinking what else to add, while hardly ever visiting other people’s profiles? Twitter has stripped everything else off the menu and sticks with the main thing: Socialising. On Twitter, reading other people’s content is even more rewarding than sending out your own. That’s just fantastic.

And for some reason, hearing “follow me on Twitter” isn’t nearly as irritating as the normal “add me as a friend” even though you can’t possibly know who I am. Twitter is public by definition, so following thousands of people is completely allowed, unlike on many other social networking sites. So, follow me on Twitter, only if you want, of course.