“I don’t get Twitter!”

“I don’t get Twitter.” I hear this quite often.  Many people don’t get Twitter.  What they often see at the very moment they are looking at Twitter, is a lot of noise.   Or, as Julia Angwin so succinctly put it in her WSJ article “When I first joined Twitter, I felt like I was in a noisy bar where everyone was shouting and nobody was listening.”  When you first look at Twitter, it does seem like a lot of people are talking and no one is listening.  And there are some pretty stupid and spam-like things being said.  However, when you pay attention to Twitter, you will realize that the people who “get” Twitter are also responding to information from and with others by “retweeting” or commenting directly on that information.  The art of any social media program is fundamentally connected to the conversation!  Twitter is no exception.

My motivation for this post was a blog I read yesterday.  I was disappointed to read that the reader gave up on Twitter before giving it a chance simply because they did not understand what Twitter really was.  The following excerpt says it all.  “Monday through Friday, I twittered business facts that were helpful hints to most readers, or so I was told.  I got great professional feedback.  Life was good.  And then I noticed an interesting fact…my wonderful readers…became inundated with feed and weren’t able to read my helpful hints.”

Yes, Twitter provides people an opportunity to share information.  More importantly, Twitter allows people to use the exchange of information and ideas to build relationships, engage in building a network or a brand, and create community through this interaction.  Engaging in a one-way broadcast of information, tips, and ideas is not interactive or relationship building.  In the end, that type of behavior is strictly personal promotion.  Do people like that information?  Yes.  Will they embrace that type of one dimensional activity on Twitter? No.  What this blogger, or ex-Twitterer, experienced wasn’t fans who couldn’t find the tweets, this blogger had fans who moved on to build better, stronger, conversation based or interactive oriented relationships.

Building a community of followers on Twitter requires the ability to exchange and share ideas and information.  It also requires that you engage people in conversation about their thoughts and ideas.  And it is going to take a lot more time and effort than one week of diligently Twittering.   Next time you find that you just don’t “get” Twitter, contact me, I will help you understand it better.

Look for my next post:  How I use Twitter