A recent article at Mashable was ’shared’ at a LinkedIn Group. The article,
STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me, discusses the quality of tweets and sort of turns up Its nose at the personal tweets. Because of association with virtual assistants at VAnetworking.com, I have learned the value of the system as ‘microblogging’ work a twitter account for my business and have set up accounts for clients.
I admit they get pretty tiresome and were a put-off that kept me off of twitter for a long time. Everyone gets tired of
- reading about trivial incidents ALL the time from someone we don’t ‘know’,
- getting un-requested recipes ‘just because’,
- getting crazy offers to get followers in outrageous numbers,
- having the news feed stuffed with links to ‘news’ (breaking news is different)
- and does some whining about reading who just swallowed their gum.
However, to some great degree, I think that they do show the REAL person behind the post, which is difficult of us to discern in the virtual world. That is the purpose of the SOCIAL part. Making some business and some non-business contact helps keep us in touch with reality. Virtual is great, but it isn’t everything.
I’ve done a few things to keep my Twitter itch under control. I am not defined by my Twitter activity and time. If I don’t tweet 50 times every day, I will not disappear. I will not auto-follow because I want my newsfeed to contain micro-blog posts from people I want to read. (Don’t give me that RSS blarney–I don’t want to see some of your stuff). Your posts may not be BAD, but they may not be anything I need to know. I will try to interact more with the people whom I do follow. Suddenly Twitter (and FaceBook) become the quick messenger; almost instant.
I see that many of the hot tweeters who were stuffing the news feed when I began have slopped off. A Twitter addiction is not good; a Twitter system where a given part of the day is set aside to add your posts or read others is healthier. I do like some of the applications that let us keep up with Twitter, especially TwitterFox, but I tune them out too. Maybe Twitter worked. While I can’t specifically track an increased work load to my social media marketing efforts, the karma must have been working for me because now I have too much work to be feeding a Twitter addiction…NO time!
At Particularly Virtual and on @ Bar JD Virtual Professionals, I will continue to track my social media activities. And remember the SOCIAL part, overlooking the intensely social posts that are more than I wanted to know about you.
