tweaking my twitter feeds
I have 2 twitter feeds: @djchuang and @djchuang247. When I first forked my original @djchuang feed in July 2009, it was to keep my personal asides and live tweets at events from overflowing the home feed of 5,000+ followers. Didn’t think they wanted to know what I ate like @sherrysurratt does.
I’ve found my use of twitter to evolve over time, and here’s 2 tweaks I’ve made recently:
1. I follow more people and removed my 10% ratio cap. I used to follow no more than 10% of my number of followers, thinking I’d catch tweets of interest on my home feed. That’s not possible with 500 follows, much less 200, really.
The difference to follow or not to follow is whether someone can DM me or not. When I want a better chance of catching tweets from people I want to keep tabs on, I’ll use a twitter list. When I want to listen in to a convo, I’ll do a saved search on a hashtag and/or keyword.
2. I’m using my main twitter @djchuang for more replies and convo’s. I used to keep my tweets limited to retweets, making announcements, and sharing links + resources + quotes. These would be more obviously valuable to 1,000s. Yet, to only do the above makes it too much of a one-way broadcast rather than a two-way conversation.
I’m now more actively replying on @djchuang as I think there’s definitely value to the conversations too, for both the replied and others listening in. The conversational tweets don’t have to be bumped to my personal twitter.
Yes, twitter can be used as a real-time broadcast feed of updates and announcements; twitter conversations make it even more valuable.
How has your use of twitter evolved?
[aside: while composing this post on iPhone didn’t save draft, thus this is shorter than it coulda been]
For me i feel like it has moved from asking questions to sharing resources. I have found now that when I send a tweet out I get a response from a couple of people, but in the past when I had smaller number of followers it was hard to get interaction.
I do not have 5000 followers, but am working to engage but also provide value to them following me.
I use to get discouraged at how many followers I had, but am content now with growing naturally and without me trying to have a ton of followers but no engagement.