The truth is that I have a love / hate relationship with twitter. I can see that it has the potential to boost my work load but I just don’t like the restrictions set by the twitter software. I don’t like following people just for the sake of getting more followers. If I follow someone I want to benefit from them… or at least have known them for a while so that I can use twitter as a chit chat medium instead of a microblogging service.
One of the things that bother me about it is that some of my tweeps are chattier than others, they tweet about their nose hairs, birds in the sky, poop in the garden… pretty much anything and everything.
And I can’t filter that out without unfollowing them. Maybe I don’t have the right tools. Maybe there are ways to make the twitter feed more like the facebook feed. Controllable.
My Twitter Setup
I use a plugin called Echofone for my firefox browser that puts a nice little blue circle in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. It allows me to tweet, read tweets and switch between twitter accounts (I have one for me @mahmoudtaji and I have one for the Voiceover Pavilion @VoicePavilion).
On my stupid iPhone I also run Echofone to do pretty much the same thing but when I am on the move or too lazy to get out of bed.
I (sometimes) see myself as a smart guy… but honestly I don’t have the time anymore to sit and try 40 or 50 applications that all do the same thing. They interface with Twitter’s site and provide you with a more robust service but which one should I use.
Confessions Of Ignorance
Here it is… the truth is that I’m absolutely crap at garnering business through twitter. So I put together a set of questions that I feel would help me better understand how you guys work with twitter to improve your business:
- What tools do you use to interface with twitter?
- How do you control someone’s torrent of tweets without having to unfollow them?
- Is their a way to automate a tweet but is not some kind of Spam bot?
- How often do you tweet per day?
- Can you illustrate for me in a story format how twitter was about to benefit you (business or otherwise).
That’s really it. I feel that in the coming posts I would like to benefit from the collective knowledge of my readers and maybe from your comments other readers can benefit in the long run.
I am in by no means a twitter noob. I use twitter almost daily … heck I even used it during the Egyptian Revolution to help the Revolutionaries spread the word about what is happening here.
But I feel like I under utilize it. I know there is more to it but I’m missing something… Can you guys help me with this?