Twitter: Follow Me Or Don’t, But Stop Whining!

First, one using Twitter has to understand what it is:  Micro Blogging.  You only have 140 characters to use to convey your message.  This has resulted in many coming up with creative ways to abbreviate words.  For example your becomes UR, are becomes R, two or to or even too becomes 2 and so on.  Many IM abbreviations such as LOL, ROFLMAO, TTYL, TTFN, IMO have also made their way into tweets.  Creativity reigns when the message is longer than 140 characters.

I found Twitter a number of years ago, and slowly dragged many in my family kicking and screaming convinced my family to try it.  My son has one but never uses it, my daughter refuses to come to the dark side, but my brothers, sister, parents and many of the nieces and nephews use it now.  Many in the blogging community use Twitter to alert their followers of a new blog post. News organizations give short headlines with links to breaking news and weather.  Many businesses like Papa John’s Pizza have tweeted coupons/specials only made known to their Twitter followers.

Blogging, be definition is an online diary or journal.  For some it is a form of a notebook.  How public they wish to make it is up to the author.  Some are wide open, others password protected.  Many blog under a pen name for anonymity while others put their real name to their work.  Bloggers are as varied as people, everyone from mommy bloggers who write about their kids and parenting, to politicians and celebrities. They put out there whatever it is they wish to share with their readers.

Twitter is micro blogging – sharing whatever the owner of that ID wishes to share with their followers.

Like with any author, we often share pieces of someone elses writings when we find it of interest.  Either within our blogs or on Twitter, or in books etc.

This is how I use Twitter:

• To share quotes and tweets from others I follow that I think are good, cool, touching etc.
• My random thoughts and actions I feel like sharing.
• To alert my followers of a new blog post I put up.
• To share others blogs I think are worth checking out.
• To share weather, headlines etc that come across my feed if I think they are note worthy to some.
• To once in a while respond to a tweet from another.
• To alert friends and followers where I am at the moment via Foursquare which updates on my Twitter feed.
• And a host of other reasons.

I follow 148 others on Twitter at the moment, that is subject to change up or down on any given day but rarely goes up. Everything from inspirational quotes to other bloggers to news stations that put out headlines and family members.

I currently have 404 people following me on Twitter, and that number rises and falls from day to day but not by many. I have no idea why they all follow me but they do.

You can chose to make your Twitter ID private so only your approved followers can see what you tweet (publish).  Or, like me, you can leave your Twitter wide open so anyone can view it and follow you.  There are family members that I follow that keep their ID locked down so only those they chose to have in the family can see what they tweet.  That is fine for them.  I keep mine open, it is what I chose to do.

Recently it came up from one of my followers that they didn’t care for all the retweets of other Tweeters tweets.  I assume of course that was directed to me, as I do retweet a good number of things I find interesting or amusing.  They felt that if they cared what someone else was tweeting they’d be following that person too.  Another member backed that up and said they don’t let others in ‘our network’.  See, who you let follow you and you follow is YOUR network.  I have my own larger circle that follows me and I follow, yours happens to over lap a few of mine but not many.

I share what I wish, because this is MY Twitter ID and I put out there what I WANT to share.  If you find that too much, don’t follow me.  Just like with Chad Ocho Cinco, I follow him on and off throughout the year.  At times he tweets so much that I just stop following him for a while, then other times I am highly amused by what he puts out.  But I am not going to tailor my tweets to what my followers think I should be sending out.  404 people on my follower list all have a different reason for why they follow me.  If you don’t care for what I send out, then don’t follow me.

For family and close friends I now have a new Twitter ID so that they can follow me without all the retweets. Hopefully now everyone is happy.