Mr Tweet Says ….. Must Work Harder

It is a month now since I wrote about my Twitter plans for 2009, so I thought I would take a look at how things are going.

I have rationlised my use somewhat across the two accounts, and am only Tweeting and conversing across the MyAppleStuff account. I am still using the Almerimar Life account, but only as a means of providing Almerimar site specific updates, regarding the weather, where I am going, what is going on etc.

According to Mr Tweet it would appear that I need to try a (lot) harder! I have added about 30 new follwers this month, the majority of which I have retained and enjoy communicating with. I have found that I have unfollowed the excessive tweeters (like 20 tweets in a row)

In my original post Wayne made a really relevant comment:

OK. I sat on this one for a couple of days. I really don’t see a real happy medium. As you mention, what you want to do is in direct conflict with what you have castigated others for doing. I personally don’t see the point in even trying to gain so many followers, or to try and follow that many people. It seems to me that anything said would be lost in the flow. The Tweets would be non-stop! How could you possibly manage them?

OK, I’ll give you those few Tweet utilities to try and tame the horde. But in using those, it’s filtering out everyone else and you would eventually only see those tweets directed to you. In effect, it would be filtering those exact tweets that is one of the reasons you like twitter for. Broadcasting a question and receiving feedback to such. If one would start to follow and be followed by thousands, how would one even see one little question? It seems to me unless I direct a question to a certain person, it rarely gets any attention. Maybe I’m not asking answerable questions? Granted that if you were followed by thousands, but only followed a select few, than that would not be a problem.

So far I have not seen this as a problem. A combination of the replies service and marking followers as favourites has made it easy enough to sieve through quickly to pick up specific tweets. The reality is that if I ask a question like ‘Sugestions for a movie tonight’ it is going to get a response from the ‘usual suspects’, and in that way Twitter is no different than any form of relationship …… there are those you are happy to hang out with, and those that you would plan to hang out with.

I still think that Twitter at the moment is all about the numbers ……. people seem more focussed on getting their followers up than actually doing anything with the medium. That said there are a few noticeable exceptions, ironically many of the ‘celebrities’ and ‘proper’ media personalities are starting to use Twitter to provide spoilers, previews, inside insights etc and I think this is a pretty smart move. I was talking to Tim yesterday about doing something similar for the MacReviewCast …… using it to interact with the listeners on a more interactive basis both pre and during a show.

For now though as far as my own plans go I need to look at increasing my own stats. I did some research recently and the only other person on Twitter within a 30km radius of me is Sands, so I am not going to get much organic growth locally, so I need a Plan B to get more followers.

That will be the focus for February. I am currently on 376 followers, so let’s see how well I do!!!