I was on my way to being a Twitter aficionado. I say that–really I was just on my way to using it a lot. I kept TweetDeck open most of the day, tried to remember to tweet about what I was reading, stuff I did (within reason), and re-tweet (RT) things that captured my attention. I was on everyday. And every day I was on, I saw power tweeters, no matter what time of day I was on. It was amazing to see this.
These guys weren’t auto-tweeters either. Well, if they were, it was a very sophisticated application they were running. At one point, I followed back an account that followed me. He would auto tweet the same tweets in a cycle and all were related to his site. I let this go on for a week before I finally unfollowed his account. So, I have an idea what cheesy auto-tweeters can look like.
The people I follow are creative writers, poets, news personalities, IT, marketing, and social media gurus, and more. They are people who want to share what they read, write and are busy doing. Sounds reasonable, right? So, what pushed me away?
It’s not About Multitasking: Rhythm and Courage
These people and organizations I follow are reading and tweeting and doing whatever else they do. So am I. Only they have this rhythm that just didn’t sing to me. Not enough to overpower my hesitations.
When TweetDeck loaded, it was in the background until I found something I was brave enough to Tweet. It took me a while to get the hang of what I wanted to say and when. It took me longer to push the button. Even after having loaded a comment with my bit.ly link, I would pause for long minutes before I pressed ENTER.
Sometimes it was a matter of sheer nerve that got me to send my tweets into the cyber-sphere. Sometimes I just changed my mind and decided to do it later.
Who am I Following Really?
I pushed through it all and got my tweets in there. In the space of a year, I managed a thousand tweets with a very small community including all the perks, a little conversation, link sharing, re-tweeting and very few direct messages (DM), (mostly in response to a received DM). I got with the program as it were, even though it wasn’t what I expected. When I signed up to Twitter, the main site sported Lee LeFever’s video about Twitter being a great way to say what you’re doing and how things are going in your day. Talking to friends and family, though.
I have over 300 people I follow and who follow me. Most of them are not my friends and family. In my immediate family, I have one brother on Twitter. I hardly ever see him on Twitter. My group consists of new friends I met from blogging, some just through Twitter, and business. Business is the overarching theme and it took a bit of getting used to.
Changing My Game Plan
You see, the only commodity I have is me and my services. I can write articles for companies, and blog posts, and design websites. But telling people what I can do is difficult because I’m somewhat shy about that.
If I’m doing it to promote a friend or a company, that’s a whole different thing. But it’s important to be established. I actually saw a job lead that said writers were expected to tweet daily. It brought up a whole lot of other questions, like whether or not I wanted to give my name to the product. But that’s for another post.
So, I decided, while I can, to tweet less. I’ve dropped down to a day or two a week. And, I’ll build back up to three or four days and go with that until it’s time to change something again. It’s important that I stay in the habit of tweeting, so I’ll have frequency to be my variables.
