Jan

03

Why I Use Twitter by Tony English

Posted by English | Posted on 03-01-2010

imagesI’ve been an early adopter of social networking for over a decade. In High School i actively attended online chat rooms. In college I was an active member of Black Planet. I was among the first of my friends to have a myspace page. I was among the tech savvy individuals on Blocksavvy and I’ve been ranting and raving about Facebook for years. Now I’m all about Twitter.
Twitter is a different than other typical social networking communities. Although less personal, only at first, you get a stream of concise notes from people and from news outlets who want to bring things to your attention. You can follow anyone who seems extraordinarily interesting (and doesn’t tweet about picking up there mail every morning). You can read up about people, celebrities, icons and companies your not following any time you want. And you  get immediate feedback to your thoughts, inquiries and  most importantly your ideas.
I didn’t feel this way a few months ago. To me, Twitter seemed like another silly tool for kids to tell each other how much alcohol they had just consumed and what they were doing while they were doing nothing at all. But a good friend and respected Digital Media consultant, Mitch Kapler,  kept sending me emails with articles about the power of Twitter and how I could use it to my advantage in promoting my new company Creative Contraband. He, with the assistance of my business partner, Kenny Mac, relentlessly suggested that  I sign up. They kept telling me I would be a natural on Twitter. Why would I send streams of short messages to people I don’t know, I wondered? But they insisted I try it. So I did. And they became my first followers.

At present I have close to two hundred followers. Not an astounding number, but among my followers are some of the most influential leaders in social media, music, and marketing in the United States and abroad. And new followers keep coming out of the woodwork. Many are amazing people. I follow only a few because I can’t keep up with all the conversations. If a follower looks very interesting I do try to at least read some of their tweetstream. I click on their names on Tweetdeck and read their last 20 posts. I have a few people I like to read closely for different purposes and topics. In that way, too, Twitter is amazing as its the most efficient mechanism I have ever seen to allow me to peruse the thought streams of others who live all over the world.

I’ll conclude this entry about Twitter with a quote from Vivek Wadhwa who tweeted an article about why he loves Twitter so much. “I firmly believe that of all forms of social media, Twitter (or more accurately, microblogging) is the only one that could have achieved this sort of effect. Writing a full blog post is time consuming and comments can be lengthy. Who wants to read or police all of them? IM is essentially a one-to-one communications tool. Facebook has elements of microblogging but it’s not really the kind of place where I want to share thoughts about immigration reform, if you know what I mean. With Twitter, I learned it in an hour, became proficient in a few more, and spend no more than 20 minutes per day on this. Because the message size is so concise, I find people say important things (or silly things, but at least they are short silly things).”

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(1) Comment

Comments (1)

  1. Flo said...

    Hmmm you may have convinced me about this newfangled Twitter-thing. Can you shoot me a link to your Tweet (Is that what you call it?)

    Posted on: 4/Jan/2010 at 08:01

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