Using Twitter

My relationship with Twitter has changed a few times.

Like a lot of bloggers, I used it. Built up a following, and used it to interact with others in my marketplace.

But, like a lot of people, I felt Twitter got to be super noisy. And my enthusiasm for the platform dropped. To be honest, I slowly shifted away from actually using Twitter. I barely ever used it… and almost all the posts that I made were automated. Essentially, I was link-dropping my latest stuff to Twitter and otherwise forgetting my profile exists.

And even though I was dropping those links out to over 14,000 followers, the results were a reflection of exactly the energy I was giving it. In other words… damn near zero. Twitter was almost zilch as a traffic source to the Blog Marketing Academy.

It seemed as if Twitter shifted. It seems like it has gotten really political. It seems as if Twitter is more of a platform for people in the media, politicians, celebs, etc. A place for them to vent off over things which, frankly, they should probably just shut up about. 😉 And then, those tweets end up becoming the basis for entire “news” stories.

It works for reporters. Trump likes it. 😉 But, for the rest of us, not so much.

But, recently, I decided to give Twitter another “go”. Only this time, quite differently.

See, Twitter has shifted. For some, it is a legit broadcast medium. For most of us, though, I now see Twitter as primarily a relationship platform. In other words, don’t use Twitter to broadcast, but instead to engage with specific people.

One little “push” that reminded me of this was a dude I’m connected to on Facebook. Like me, he said Twitter was pretty much dead to him but that he decided to give it another chance. He began to engage with specific people he cared about. In his case, he used it to connect to the author of a book that had changed his life and he actually sparked up an exchange with this book author.

But, see, the idea here is that he used Twitter as a person-to-person platform. A one-to-one platform… not one-to-many.

And, I know full well Twitter can work well for that. I mean, there are a lot of movers and shakers out there, some more famous than others, all using Twitter. It is a very equal opportunity playing field, and it gives opportunities to reach out and connect with people in ways you couldn’t do it before.

My biggest problem with Twitter is the NOISE. So, to make Twitter useful again, I had to make some changes. I was following close to 3,000 people. A lot of them were people I had no earthly idea who they were. And my Twitter feed was full of garbage as a result. So, I unfollowed pretty much ALL of them. It is no judgement of them. I just didn’t know them… or perhaps I was already connected to them elsewhere and didn’t need to be connected on Twitter, too.

I peeled my follow list down to 200. I only follow 200 people.

I may follow others. This isn’t some weird, arbitrary number I came up with. But, point is…

The Twitter experience will be what you make of it. I made it less noisy by simply removing all the noise and instead following people truly because I wanted to follow what they said.

The days of following mass numbers of people in some vein effort to auto-follow your way to a big follower list are OVER. It’s been dead a long time, actually.

Twitter is all about person-to-person engagement. That is, unless you’ve already got a big following who prefers Twitter.

For us bloggers who have been looking at Twitter as a place to distribute your new content…

The workability of that is limited. It’s just a noise thing.

I think, if you’re going to bother with Twitter anymore, that you think of it as a way to originate communications to others in your marketplace and to have genuine exchanges with other individuals.

You should be replying to others more than you simply post your own stuff.

We’ve got to make Twitter personal again.

It’s really the only workable use of Twitter these days, in my opinion. If you’re trying to see how Twitter works into your own content marketing strategy these days, that’s about it.

Sure, you can drop your new blog post links in there. But, even better would be to spark a conversation. Start up a thread. Make it engaging. And reach out to people directly.

If you wanna connect with me, you can follow me on Twitter here. But, again, only if you want to follow along. I don’t promise I’ll follow you back. Cuz, I’m doing Twitter differently. We all have to do it our own way, and make Twitter something useful for us.

How are YOU using Twitter? Have you given up on it? Or, do you still use it a lot?

Reply back and lemme know.

I’m interested in what the collective mindset is on this tool right now for us normies who don’t like to virtue signal all day long or spark press stories. 😉

– David