The obligatory Twitter post

I’ve been using Twitter for nearly a year now. As someone who lives alone (and currently spends a load of time alone at home) it’s nice to get the occasional thought from the ether.

Twitter can be a place to vent your frustrations, get a laugh, groan, find advice or offer advice, all in 140 characters.

I’m not going to write a long post on how you should use Twitter. There are plenty of those. But I will talk about what I think you should and should not do.

Marketing on Twitter

Don’t.

Just kidding. Sort of.

It’s very difficult to engage a consumer on Twitter. Your tweets will need to provide relevant, practical information, such as new product releases, updates, etc. without sounding robotic. Very few companies actually get this right, but very few companies actually try.

If you insist on doing this, be prepared to get negative feedback. If you’re good, you’ll engage those negative tweeters and try to rectify whatever their problems are.

Blogs? If you’re only going to update when you have a new blog post, don’t bother. I probably already follow your RSS feed.

The RT

I personally avoid retweeting. It feels almost like a lack of one’s own creativity. Also, I find it annoying. If someone I follow retweets too much I normally end up unfollowing them [too much defined henceforth as 1 RT : 5 OT - original tweets].

EgoTwists

I’m talking about

@soandso has listed themselves in the Narcissists Directory under #bigego #douchebag #yawn

Constantly tweeting about accomplishments or things you think make you seem more impressive are really just a turn off. As far as I know the public directory hasn’t provided one ounce of usefulness – except, perhaps for social media marketers trying to find a good list of people to follow.

Over sharing

Nobody needs to hear that you’ve been constipated for a week. Except maybe your doctor. Although I doubt he/she follows you on Twitter.

The dreaded celebrity tweeter

I’m talking about you, Ashton Kutcher, and you, Britney Spears. See also EgoTwists.

There are good examples of celebrity tweeters: @alyankovic and @johncleese to name a few.

I followed Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry but ended up dropping them because they were tweeting too often and mostly about stuff I just didn’t care about.

I still follow @tinafey, but I’m not entirely certain it’s really her, which leads into my “beware the fake celebrity” bit.

I was really disappointed to find out @cwalken was not actually Christopher Walken. The tweets were brilliant at most times and really just seemed deranged enough to be genuine. When Gawker outted him, the account was suspended and he set up shop as @notcwalken. I follow it still because the tweets crack me up.

Cue the sad trombone

My personal pet peeve is the MiserTweet. People who only tweet about bad things that happen to them.

Yes, everyone vents on Twitter. It’s good for the soul. But don’t only vent on Twitter.

On the other hand, it would be kind of funny if someone write a country song on Twitter. Each tweet being a verse. You could start with “I just missed the last bus home” and go from there. In fact, I know for a fact that there’s more than one Twitter account out there that reads like a country song. Yeehaw.

Last note

Most of my local friends don’t see the point of Twitter. My best explanation is that it’s sort of like Facebook status updates. They still don’t get it. And that’s ok with me.