Full-time Twitter For One Week
I’ve been using Twitter sporadically over the last year now. Almost no-one I know uses it so I’ve never had a great opportunity to explore it’s social uses.
I have explored ways to use it for getting news feeds like the BBC Twitter bots, distributing feeds from my owns sites using Twitterfeed and writing about how [...]
I’ve been using Twitter sporadically over the last year now. Almost no-one I know uses it so I’ve never had a great opportunity to explore it’s social uses.
I have explored ways to use it for getting news feeds like the BBC Twitter bots, distributing feeds from my owns sites using Twitterfeed and writing about how you could use Twitter to organize home and work life.
What I’ve thought about doing now, however, is really using Twitter as much as possible. This way I can really gauge how useful it is to me. The main way I will do this is simply by updating my status as much as possible.
There are several positive outcomes I can already recognize:
- More followers - I already have quite a few without going out and adding people. These are people I don’t know but seem interested in what I’m doing enough to follow me on Twitter.
- Friends interest - Because I’ll be constantly using Twitter, interest from my actual friends will be piqued and more may be tempted to join. That means I will have more real contacts to explore.
- Self-reflection - This is quite an abstract one, but since I’ll have constant documentation of how my time is spent I should be more able to establish where I waste time and how I can get more done in my day etc.
- Less time on other networks - I’ve found Facebook to be quite the annoyance and time sink. With the Twitter Facebook App my profile is updated with my Twitter updates. This means I really don’t have to go to Facebook anymore. If I want to add photos, for instance, I can create a Flickr account, grab the feed and add it to Twitterfeed. That way Facebook friends will not only get my updates, but also my photos etc.
There are, obviously, some negative aspects to doing this that I don’t think yet weigh out the positives:
- Time - I’ll be posting on Twitter a lot more, and so may be wasting time doing that. Will I be spending too much time on Twitter? Updating is very quick and easy with a mobile and that lovely Firefox extension for posting in your address bar.
- Less followers - This doesn’t mean much to me but there is the possibility that because I am constantly updating my status, some followers will be detered and not want to keep following. This is the reason I took Leo Laporte off mine a while ago.
Sound simple? It’s just a little more effort. Check out my Twitter page here: twitter.com/craigchilds
Tags: Twitter