Chances are you may have come to this post because someone (me?) twittered the link. (Or you may be someone who stops by regularly via rss or other means, for which I thank you.) At the same time I have fairly recently complained about linking in twitter. Of course a real explanation takes more than 140 characters and so...here's a blog post.
The person, who had followed me so I was checking their twitter feed, and the top tweet asked, "How do you get more followers." My response was provide more content than links (as 90% of the page was links to their blog.)
So are links bad? Of course not. I tweet links all the time, including about my blog posts, and just as this person replied - I do like to know what other people are looking at on the internet. But that comes, of course, with a caveat.
I want to know what people I think are interesting, or I think have some common interests with me, or people I am friends with are looking at on the internet. There is plenty of stuff out on the internet I have no desire to look at.
When I use twitter to find these links I essentially am filtering by who I follow.
And how do I chose who follow? I ask, is the content of that person's tweets interesting, is this someone I know by other channels is interesting or shares a common interest, or is this person a friend.
As you can see by how many I follow, I follow back most people who follow me. I once tried cutting back the list followers to a "manageable amount" and that very day I had great conversation via @ message from someone I had just unfollowed. At that point I decided I'd follow those I think are interesting and would be someone I'd have a conversation with, and trust I'll catch the right things in the mighty flow of the twitter stream.
If you want people to follow you - and that is your stated goal, share who you are so people can known if you are a person they want to follow. That's the real secret, and I've read the same or heard the same from many. So share your links and announce your posts but also share some thoughts and comments in your twitter stream. We'd like to know you.
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3 comments:
I like it. It comes back to balance. Where can I share some of my day to day as a human, where can I share what I think, and where can I expand on those thoughts to fully express an idea. And where we can find those places- on twitter, on other micro-platforms, on our own blogs and on the blogs of others- we can participate in a greater conversation than any of those individual locations can host. Thanks for reminding us to be thoughtful of the what and where and how we share our thoughts online.
Thanks, Goldie, for this guidance. I'm a new user on Twitter and am both observing how other people are using Twitter and trying out different ways of using my Twitter feed.
I'm still figuring out where it fits into the rest of my "eco-system" that consists of three blogs, an acct on Facebook, an acct on LinkedIn, and an old fashioned ezine. I agree that no matter what the medium, people want to know you as a human being.
Also agree with Jenna's remark on balance--it's the mix that makes the reading so compelling.
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