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?

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People ask me about Twitter because I’m doing it. I would love to tell them something insightful, wise and born of my months of tweeting. But really it’s something that you have to do to learn how to do it. And relax on demanding that you understand it.
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Why Social Media?

Social media is the environment in which communities can blossom. This is far different from websites which are largely one-sided.

Websites are great. It takes a lot of work to pull together the wealth of information to sustain an informative and current website. When done well, they can be great repositories to which readers will return, and refer others. And generally websites list ways that you can contact them, although some make it really hard to find.

What difference does social media offer? The major important difference I see is that social media provides the opportunity to connect with the authors quickly and have a dialogue right on the site. And social media is by definition informal–you know the social aspect. Social media presents fresh usually stamping the posting date.
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Remember how you first heard of Twitter? Did you have all sorts of ideas of what to expect? And when you read blog posts in which people referred to Twitter, did your expectations take on more detail?

Mine didn’t.

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