When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was a stupid idea. If I wanted to talk to someone, I would e-mail them, or talk to them on some instant messaging service. Why would I leave what amounts to “status updates” on an external service for everyone to read?
I then registered for an account and gave it my best go at really using it. I wondered if it would be as addictive as people had said, but I found it to be distracting and fairly useless. People told me I was using it wrong. They said I wasn’t following enough people, nor the right people, and that I should be using a desktop client to keep up to date on what others were saying, and publishing my own thoughts.
I tried following more people. I tried to follow celebrities, people with lots of followers, names that I recognized, people that ran sites that I recognized, and even people in my local area, and it did become more compelling to use. I was interacting with hundreds of people, and even started to use my large base of followers to help me promote my articles in the social media scene.
Just like others, I asked politely for people to give a thumbs up on StumbleUpon if they enjoyed what I had written, and it helped bring in some traffic, but I started to feel overwhelmed.
I downloaded and installed various software onto my laptop that would allow me to organize information better, and interact with Twitter in a more efficient way, but I found it quickly becoming a time sink. I was distracted too often, trying to keep up on what hundreds of people were doing, and many of them were pushing out ten or twenty messages a day.
I quickly removed the software, and realized that I should only interact with Twitter when I had the time, or if I needed to publish something, and I started to feel better about my interactions with the site, but as weeks passed, I felt like I was missing something, and recently, I clued into what it was. I was missing out on hundreds of updates from all sorts of people. Some of them were important ones from my friends or people that I respected. A few were even business related, and could have lead to money making opportunities for me.
I realized then that I was following too many people. I couldn’t have conversations with my friends that I only connect to on Twitter because their updates were being pushed off the front page so quickly that I never even noticed them.
It is with that realization, that I have decided to create a new Twitter account that will be paired with this site. I will only follow around fifty people, and hopefully create deeper connections with all of them.
The big question I have now will be how that will effect everything that I have done. I have built up over five hundred followers on my old account, while I have five on my new one. Will people move over and follow me, knowing that I won’t follow most of them back?
Of course there are many more questions that will also come up over time, and I don’t know if this was the smartest move in terms of branding, but I do know that doing this will help bring back some enjoyment to my Twitter experience.
If you are interested in following me on Twitter, please check out my BrandingDavid account.
