I just read Rich Maggiani’s blog post Effectively Managing Twitter and aside from being many months behind all the other hundreds of “use these tools to find people to follow” articles out there, I really think the post misses the mark. I firmly believe Twitter is a social media tool, something that I think most “social media experts” overlook. Rather than get into details (save it for another blog post, perhaps), read his article, and then read my comment which I’ve reproduced below:
Using tools like these can be useful to a degree, but I prefer an actual social approach to social media. I follow based on word of mouth and exchange of ideas. I think I used a friend finder once, and it found so many poor matches for my needs/wants that I just gave up. Follow the people you know and who interest you. They will RT others who will be of interest to you; follow those people too. Grow organically. Act socially.
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Spot on. Post the link to Maggiani’s blog.
Agreed. Twitter’s brought me closer to the tech writing community in which i work, but my friend list grew organically.
let’s not take the social out of twitter before it even starts!
My comment was:
I always look critically at my Twitter stream, and I don’t find many useless tweets at all. Sure, some tweets don’t interest me (eg, anything to do with hockey), but the reason I follow those I do is that I’m interested in most of what they have to say. I have a wide variety of interests, and Twitter helps me satisfy all of them.
I use TweetDeck to keep everything organized, with columns for either specific accounts or specific searches. On really busy days, some columns don’t get read. That’s OK…there have always been hundreds (heck, millions) of conversations I missed just by not being where those conversations are taking place. The fact that I’m following people doesn’t mean I absolutely have to read everything. It means that the conversations are there when I want to jump in.
I’ve never used tools to build my Twitter network. The only “tool” I used was “the long tail”. I started out following a handful of people I knew. Then people started following me for some strange reason. I checked out their tweets and thought “hmm, interesting”, and I followed back. (Or blocked if they were about teeth whiteners, real estate, or, um, you know, those other ones.) Then I noticed my friends retweeting from someone who had interesting tweets and checked out that person.
It almost sounds like a positive pyramid scam!