About two weeks ago, a few friends of mine finally gave me the clue to my frustrating question: "How to make Twitter a more enjoyable and user-friendly experience".
Answer: Add a Twitter app to my phone so that I don't get a million texts draining my phone and easily follow my friends who have all but abandoned Facebook and MySpace. So I downloaded ÜberTwitter to my Blackberry Tour and started playing to see what all the fuss was about.
Prior to having ÜberTwitter, Twitter wasn't user-friendly to me because I wouldn't/couldn't sit on a computer all day following and writing tweets. I have too much to do and accomplish to be glued to the PC and only sporadically remembered to text a tweet. Once I downloaded the app, I had to ask a few very silly questions. Things like: "Why are people using a bot to ask me to verify if I am 'real' using a bot?", "What do all the #'s mean?", "Why do 'people' say it matters how many followers I have?" and "What are people actually using Twitter for?"
Lucky for me, I have a lot of real life friends on my Twitter and they helpfully guided me through my questions as I figured it out. Twitter is definitely an app that you have to actually use to figure out how it works. I think that the reason most of my friends who are not on Twitter are not using it, is they don't have the time or patience to figure out how to make 140 characters useful to them and why it's worthwhile and valuable.
So to pay it forward, I will try to answer those questions via things I learned so far and dumb it down so to speak for those who are interested. Let me preface the rest of what I will write by saying that I am in no means a Twitter expert nor do I claim to be, so anything I say that is incorrect cannot be held against me at this point. I'm still a tweet newbie too, but I see potential, which is valuable and worth sharing in this space. ;)
Question #1: "Why are people using a bot to ask me to verify if I am 'real' using a bot?"
Answer: One of the first thing I noticed is there are a lot of bots on Twitter, and I personally am not at all interested in following a 'robot'. I am interested in keeping up with my friends, random and useful information, news articles and updates, inspirational quotes and sayings, having a laugh at some of the hilarious things people do and say, and most importantly using any communication tool that will spread a good and right message to the world. As it turns out, the method I've used is to look at a user's page before I follow them. If I think they have something interesting to say, I add them to my list of "following". If all I see is sales ads and pitches for products and services, I kindly bypass them with no disrespect because I certainly don't want to spend my day looking at business ads all day posted by someone I don't even know.
Question #2: What do all the #'s mean?
Simple answer: They are twitter tags of trending topics.
The tags are a good way of following a trend, especially if you don't necessarily know the people speaking about a topic and want to find more information on that topic of interest. For example, #NowPlaying is a tag I use when tweeting a song I'm currently listening to. #Quotes is a tag for inspirational quotes and sayings. #FF or Follow Friday is a tag for Follow Friday which is a great way to acknowledge the friends & people that you believe are worthy of having other Twitter users follow as well.
The question I'm now pondering and playing with is "How can I create my own trends?" as I integrate my twitter experience with my personal and professional goals and experiences.
A group of my friends at Dog Town Studios set out on a mission this week called "Project 72". Their mission: Project 72. 4 boys setting out on a mission to create a successful iPhone game in 72 hours from start to finish and document the progress on this site for anyone interested to see.
I find this challenge completely intriguing/noteworthy/awesome (not just because they are my friends) but because they are out there pushing not only their own limits but creating new trends of proving what can be accomplished with technology in such a short time span. They not only launched a successful iPhone app from start to finish in 72 hours, but blogged the experience as well as had live feed streaming their progress while they built the app from scratch... IN 72 HOURS. Amazing. At the end of their challenge, they had about 10 minutes to spare before accomplishing their mission, submitting the app to IPhone for review and popping open the champagne in celebration of their success.
This is a perfect example of when it is a good idea to create a trend so that people can easily track and follow their project; so their Twitter tag became #Project72. This will also be useful as the word spreads as part of their long-term marketing/advertising strategies and as their product launches and people want to continue to follow their progress and projects. So while I'm not going to list all of the different tags and their translations here, I think you should now be able to easily follow trends and tag your own tweets for others to follow.
Question #3: "Why do 'people' say it matters how many followers I have?"
Answer: I don't think it really matters for my current use of Twitter during the learning experience, but I can now obviously see that if you are twittering business information or marketing a product or service, the more followers you have, the more people your message is reaching. I still haven't decided what I would like to "accomplish" with my Twitter so right now this isn't yet relevant to me. Funny enough, I think just by tweeting my random daily experiences and thoughts, I have had over 100 additional followers just in one week.
Important to note, Twitter is a "keyword driven tool". The people you will attract will find you based on what you type into your 140 character tweets. I figured this one out, very simply, because I have a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology so I have a habit of paying attention to statistics and trends. By mentally noting my tweet topics and the subsequent followers I gained, I noticed clear and consistent patterns. When I typed "eBay" while writing about my eBay experiences, eBay users followed; when I typed a quote that was running through my mind, inspirational users followed; when I typed "health", health users followed... and so on and so forth. So Twitter actually does support a law of attraction theory. You will attract the people on Twitter who have similar interests, hobbies, habits as you, or at least "what you tweet about". Likewise, you can type the name/item/hobby/topic of interest into the search bar and view/follow other users who tweet about these things at your discretion.
Question 4: "What are people actually using Twitter for?"
Answer: EVERYTHING! :)
I am only a little over a week into really testing and using Twitter but I can tell you for certain already that people are tweeting about everything and anything we can think of. With a little creative thought, by putting focused effort into your Twitter Topics and by being REAL, Twitter is an extremely useful social media tool to spread news and information on any topic you choose.
I'm still pondering what message I'd like to send to the world in a public domain. I have some ideas, but once I nail it down and feel confident that it's the "RIGHT" message, I will use it for these purposes as well. In the meantime, I'm really enjoying the Twitter experience as of now. My advice would be that the best way of learning Twitter is by actually doing it, playing with it, making mistakes and continuing forward. This is my advice for most things, but definitely applies to tweeting.
I must also note that I am not thrilled with the brevity of message content. I don't like spelling with errors and am not thrilled that Twitter is forcing me to write short-hand and/or grammatically incorrect words/sentences. Most of the time, I just need more than 140 characters to clearly and accurately portray a worthwhile thought. I'm making effort nevertheless to go with the flow on this topic.
Lastly, my favorite day of Twitter experience so far was Friday for #FF Follow Friday. It was/is so fun to acknowledge the people I know and respect as well as my new friends who are amazing and have good messages to share. That's worth tweeting about.
