I have had a Twitter (@BenTortora) account for quite a while, but was never an active user. I mainly had it because I read a few people were using it, and I figured I better get in quick before I lost my desired usernames to someone else. However it all changed at one search engine conference I attended.
At the recent Search Engine Room event in Sydney a few weeks ago, ProBlogger was speaking us about the success he was having with social media, especially twitter. What it did for his branding and exposure I was quite suprised. So I thanked him via Twitter (naturally), and from then on decided to give Twitter a serious go for a couple of weeks.
Since then, I have been hooked and definitely fully enjoying the experience. I admit that I am no Twitter expert user, or have thousands of active followers. Nor did I start my Twittering on the right foot. I didn’t realise I needed to “get” Twitter, and all the unwritten rules of joining this new culture and medium of communication. To be honest, I was mainly there to try to generate exposure and traffic to my websites. Thankfully though, I quickly realised Twitter did not deserve to be spammed.
The Rookie Mistakes I Made
Below, I’ll openly admit the errors I made when I first started Twittering, to help any other new users:
- I used my company name as my username. Not only that, I was posting personal tweets under the company username. So a company was whinging that he was stuck in traffic or had too many tasks to do, not very logical.
- I did not have a picture of myself. Now I’m not one to splash my photo all over the Internet, but I realised that I was conversing with real people, and that I had nothing really to be ashamed of. If I was willing to tweet what I was thinking/doing, they might as well put a face to the name.
- Take and not receive. Everyone was sharing links back and forth and I thought I stumbled onto a goldmine of information. Trouble was, I was not returning the favour. So I applied the principle that there is more happiness in giving that receiving.
- Following people that didnt share common interests. At the end of the day, Twitter allows you to share information and opinions and links about the things you care about the most. So if you help people in your industry, or you help people that share similar hobbies, they would be probably much more appreciate information about “information architecture” than your girl friend who is a school teacher.
But I have learned from my mistakes, learnt from experienced twitter’s that are using the medium successfully, and more importantly, enjoying every minute of my user experience. Especially what I find most interesting is that since being still young in my career, in 5-10years, I can pull my twitter logs and see how far I have come in my skills development and acknowledge those who helped me improve. I have access via twitter to some amazing people in my industry, and there is no other place I would get that information besides twitter.
And I guess at the end of the day, that’s what its all about. Making sure we learn something new everyday.
