5 Rules For Using Twitter

Lord help me, I’m on Twitter.

I’ll be quite honest with you, I wasn’t initially impressed with Twitter. It seemed kinda pointless to me. My opinion changed after I read an interview with Chris Brogan at Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Chris spoke about using Twitter as a way to engage in conversations, and keep an eye on what other relevant conversations are out there. So I started browsing around Twitter, and I found it sort of interesting. I also found it a bit inspiring. After I started thinking about Twitter and how I want to use it, I came up with some rules that I am going to try and follow, and wish others would, too:

1) Don’t tell me what you are doing– tell me what you are thinking.

2) Don’t tell me where you are going– tell me what moves you.

3) Don’t just tell me you wrote a new blog post– tell me why you did it.

4) Don’t just notify– engage and inspire.

5) Make sure you follow, but also try to lead.

I know that I am going to break these rules a few times here and there, and probably bore people with mundane stuff every once in a while, but I think that if I can write three posts that follow these rules for every one post that breaks them, Twitter could be pretty interesting.

I look at Twitter like this: it is a place for people to engage one another, instantaneously and very acutely. It can be so much more than “what are you doing?”. I’ll give you two examples of notable Twitter members who I think are wasting their tweets:

1) The New York Times: As near as I can tell, the only thing the NYT is using their tweets for is to push headlines from their website. Isn’t that what RSS is for? The NYT main feed has 25 followers, over half of which are just other NYT feeds. Robert Scoble, on the other hand, has over 5000 followers. Why? Because he is engaging people, sharing something interesting. The NYT is just pushing headlines. They have columnists, don’t they? Would it really kill the NYT to offer us something other than what we already have access to?

2) John Edwards: This is a man who is running for President of the United States, and all he wants to tell us is when he is getting on a tour bus or making a campaign stop? Is that all he has to say? Here is a perfect opportunity to engage voters on a daily basis, to inspire, to share insights in a personal way. For once in my life, I would like to see a politician get off the script and share something meaningful. I can go to a website to find out about the next public appearance.

So that’s it. Those are my initial thoughts about Twitter and my plan to use it more effectively. Sure, I’ll use it for pedestrian stuff from time to time, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could take something ordinary and transform it into something altogether different. . .

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