Observations from a Twitter Newbie – and My New Twitter Commandments

After creating my Twitter account about a year ago, I gave up rather quickly, feeling frustrated that I couldn’t get lots of followers quickly and that I needed to be on it for hours a day in order for it to work.  I now know that I was wrong, and have recently started really getting back into Twitter.  Now I think I get it much better than previously, and have vowed to give it another shot.

I have noticed a few things, though – there is a lot of clutter on Twitter.  It seems like everyone there is a social media or SEO expert, giving advice on how to succeed on Twitter.   Those who aren’t are selling programs for getting tens of thousands of followers.  I like to think that I’m smart enough not to fall for that.  How can there be any quality from buying your way to followers?

I’ve also noticed that getting followers is the end-all-be-all for many people, so everything they do has the sole purpose of getting more followers.  I fell for it myself for a while – retweeting something I really didn’t care about just to get noticed.  Complimenting someone when I didn’t really mean it in the hopes they’d follow me, and following people I had no interest in just so they would hopefully follow me back.  All that has left me feeling shallow and phony – if that’s what Twitter’s about, I want no part of it.

But I don’t feel that that’s what Twitter’s about.  I think that if you find your way through the fluff, you can find some quality people.  So here are my own commandments for proceeding with Twitter, my way:

1.       I will not follow anyone unless I am genuinely interested in them.  This may mean I will have less followers, but at least they will be genuine.
2.       I will not retweet something unless I really like it.
3.       I will not compliment someone unless I really mean it.
4.       Everything I do on Twitter will be real, not just in order to get followers.
5.       I will give to the Twitter community: quality posts, discussions, questions, answers.

So obviously these things apply to real life also – funny that it took Twitter to remind me to be real, to give, and hopefully I will get back.  Be a resource, and people will respond.  Only time will tell if this will work for me on Twitter.  Wish me luck!