I’ve been sitting up against a milestone in my life. I’m about tweet for the 5,000th time. In fact if I time things right, this blog post announcement auto-tweet will be my 5,000th. It’s not really that life-changing of an event, but I figured now would be a good time to reflect on some of the highlights and mistakes I’ve made using twitter.
Here are some of my highlights looking back:
- Announced the birth of both of my girls via twitter.
- Shared numerous links that I liked or found interesting.
- Helped my dad sell his iPhone 3G.
- Met some new friends.
- Gave away a Mavericks ticket (or two).
- Learned some cool stuff from others.
- Publicly affirmed friends and family.
And here are some mistakes I’ve made along the way:
- Tweeted about some monotonous details of my life.
- Complained about being in boring meetings (and later called out about it).
- Paid too much attention to my phone when I should have paid attention to the people around me.
- Spoke more than listened.
- Gave TMI quite a few times.
- Ignored twitter for large chunks of time.
- Felt like having more followers somehow made me more important.
Ultimately I’ve decided that the reason I tweet is to add value to the lives of others. That might be random thoughts I have throughout the day. It might be sharing a link to a site I find useful. Or it might be just to share a little bit more about who I really am so people can know the real me a little better.
Those are just a few thoughts I’ve had looking back. What are your thoughts about twitter? Do you have any tweets you’ve regretted posting? If you follow my tweets, what do you like best? What should I stop doing?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
The followers thing is something that happens to every Twitter user, methinks, even if they never admit it. I’m glad I got over that, too. Heck, I pick up a couple of new followers every day, yet week after week, my overall follower count pretty much remains the same. And to be honest, I couldn’t care less if it dropped to sub-300.
Now my *following* count…*that’s* something I need to get under control… 8^)
I have the same thing going on with my followers count. I think there is a trend of people trying to bait new followers by first following then later unfollowing people. Doesn’t really work on me because I rarely follow someone if I can’t tell who they are.
I’ve been using a combo of lists and apps to keep my following under control. I feel like I could keep following a bunch of people and still not feel overwhelmed.
I learned a valuable lesson over the weekend. If you provide a valuable service to a customer who has over 30k plus followers and over 3k tweets, they may mention how pleased they are to their followers thus leveraging the power of their social media network. Thanks @TomZiglar
Dude, that’s awesome! I just read the two tweets he sent out. Maybe that will generate some future business.
I’m not sure it’s a mistake to tweet “monotonous” details of your life. It may go against common Twitter wisdom, but I think it’s good to have every day stuff. You know how Christmas letters are often full of wonderful things that have happened and you read it and wonder if anything ever goes wrong in that family? The letters never really represent the whole of someone’s life, and give an impression of perfection that is most likely untrue. Same thing applies to Tweets, IMO. Life is interesting stuff, and life is dull stuff and your Tweets will be a more accurate depiction of life if they have both.
How’s that for a long explanation of why I don’t mind the monotonous detail tweets?
Good points Joyce. I actually was Tweeting in my first month 10 times a day with short things like “studying” and things like that. Dull stuff, but maybe some people would like it.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Darn, I seem to have missed out on the Maverick tickets…LOL
As far as followers go on my end, I just let them follow me (maybe because I have no idea how to remove them).
There likely will be future Mavs opportunities.
If someone follows you that you don’t want to see your updates you can block them. I think there’s a button next to their twitter name when you view your followers.