Twitter vomit—a great way to get removed

I recently started using Twitter. For the longest time I couldn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. Now I get it, and I like using it. It’s a great networking tool, and a cool way to follow industry leaders and pass around breaking news that you care about. To me Twitter is different from many other social media sites out there because it’s not overloaded with tools and apps I don’t need. Twitter is so simple and I think that’s why it has taken off.

Getting funny links or informative information from colleagues and friends is cool, but you can also follow company Twitters or big names in any given industry. I have added a few of these names to my Twitter but found that after only a few days I would remove them. The reason? A massive overload of messages or tweets. I was sitting at my desk the other day and looked at all my tweets from a cell phone I was following and my first thought was this is like Twitter vomit. Maybe some of it was good, but if I log on and all I see is one users tweets taking up the whole first page there is a problem.

I think Twitter is a great way to promote your company, product or blog, but don’t flood your users. I find myself much more likely follow links from tweets that consistently post quality without overloading me. If my front page is filled up with one users tweets, that’s a little annoying and the easiest way for me to get those off my screen is by not following you anymore.

So far I have removed one company product and one blogger from my Twitter. The sad part is I was and still am very interested in that product and that blogger, I just didn’t want to see 10 messages from them in less than 4 hours. Don’t abuse your followers, because if they are like me, you may find them dropping off. The ones that don’t drop off may just skip your tweets.

An example of a big name using Twitter well in my opinion is Barack Obama. I mostly added him to see how a politician would use social media; more out of curiosity than anything. I’m not even American and know little about him. He (or whoever he has doing it for him) rarely posts to Twitter, but when they do I usually see it since the tweet does not come up often.

One other Twitter tip is set up an icon. Tweets with the default icon blend into each other, and users are more likely to skip over them. If your icon is unique it will stand out more.

You can follow me on Twitter, I post blog updates, comments and the occasional links that I find interesting.

Happy tweeting.