I know there are as many reasons to join twitter as there are tweets. One of my reasons to join twitter was to grow—personally that is.
Here’s an example of what I mean: man tweets (yes I know his name but I am not going to tell you) “what the hell is up with all the quotes. If you don’t have something original to say shut up”. He still has 45 characters left, but doesn’t use them.
I smiled when I read that. Yes, that thought has crossed my mind from time to time, but the tweet made me recognize it. I almost tweeted him back “I could imagine myself saying that when I have on my grumpy pants”. But we had never DM each other so I decided not to. But I do that—put on my grumpy pants some days and say things I wish I didn’t.
Instead I checked out his home page. Guess what he has done? About 4 tweets back, sure enough there is a quote! Oh man. Now I really, really want to tweet him. I notice he is a big RT’er. By the way what is the difference between a RT and a quote? Ummmm, let me think. Oh, I know, not a gal darn difference. I can feel a tweet welling up in me. Something like, “when you point the finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back to you”. or “pull your head out of your ass”. I am debating which one is more PC. But then I remembered, “I do that”: tell others not to do the same thing I do. There goes my tweet.
Did I do that?
In comes another tweet from someone who thinks she has a pithy poem about following –she DM’s that she is happy to follow you—but don’t expect to be followed back. And if you unfollow her? She says she will get bitchy! Can you believe it? I mean isn’t following folks back the golden rule on twitter? It must be,
I read it on the internet and it was written by a social media expert who used to be a realtor and just got into social media last month.
Pithy Poem Gal, I did unfollow you. Mostly because your poem scared me. I mean even on my worst days……..oh wait; I do that. I want folks to do one thing and sometimes I don’t want to reciprocate.
As far as the social media expert. Now there will never, ever be a time I claim to be one. I claim expertise in teaching about life’s energies. I have been doing it for over 25 years now. Everything, and I mean everything is energy, and form is just the container. Here in Earth School we get fixated on form. It is part of the human condition. That is why I need personal growth. Spiritual growth. It turns out twitter is perfect for that. Just like all forms of energy, what ever is happening is your growth now.
Thank you, grumpy pants man. Thank you, pithy poem gal. Thank you, social media expert.
Hey Karen,
I am a new tweeter too and I have enjoyed your two latest tweet related posts, which is my way of saying I have already found value in following you. To me unfollow is the great redeeming feature of Twitter. Most of us who are discriminating whether to follow in the first place, based on the last few pages of tweets on a profile, are subscribing on a trial basis. If we don’t see occasional value in a tweet or link, we don’t want to be looking at the same ole, same ole, day after day. Likewise the super marketers. To see your top 30, 40, 50 ads day after day, well, in a few weeks, I will have extracted most of the value you’ve had to offer and it’s time to give some other tweeter a chance. Don’t want your stuff cluttering my pages any more, moving the good stuff ever further apart and making me scroll 20 pages every two hours to find the value.
I think most of us beginners were reluctant to subscribe in the first place and I still cannot imagine following 10,000 tweeters in any meaningful way. I suspect no one really does. Maybe once a day we find something special enough to make the whole exercise worth the time and effort. On the other hand, I usually have a few things I’d like to share and I assume the people who followed me first would like to read them from time to time. But there are only a few duplicates I will put out on any week, so good or bad, I post fresh content and only post bursts when my creative juices are really flowing or there is a lot I want to say on a particular subject or two. I imagine some things from a burst get retweeted and I find a new follower. I am now doing courtesy follows mostly just to see how soon the whole thing becomes too tedious and forces me to start unfollowing. Percentage wise, I’ll guess I am really happy to be following about 10% of the total. Another 10% please me just often enough, I’d follow for a month or so to see if the frequency improves, assuming everyone else is on a learning curve as well. Truth is, I am enjoying the experience more than I thought I would, in spite of the annoyances I expected, so I’ll be hanging in there for a while.
Blessings X 10,
Ed
Hi Ed,
Great Comments. Thank you for taking the time to share.