Twits, Tweeple, Twitterverse & Twitterings

I’m officially a Twitter addict. Twitter is a mini-blog in the simplest of terms. You have 140 characters to promote yourself, meet people, say something of interest (or not), reply to others and basically chit-chat or ‘Tweet’.

I can’t help myself checking to see what’s happening in my little Twitterverse multiple times a day, and getting into conversations with people who were complete strangers up to a few days or weeks ago.

In all honesty they are still strangers apart from that fact that in my Twitterverse, they are my ‘Tweeple’. I choose to follow every bit of their day, and they for some bizarre reason choose to follow my antics. I’m going to mention @MartinBowling here as a case in point. We’ve been mutually following each other for a few months now, neither of us knowing jack-shee about the other apart from what our 140 character bio allowance says. While mine very eloquently mentions the fact that I hate brussel sprouts, Martin touches on his plans for world domination.  I felt it prudent to become one of his Tweeple, one never knows…

After tentatively ‘following’ each other’s tweets and the informative, humorous or total lack of inspirational thought processes associated with my our Tweets, it appears as though we were each happy to continue to follow the other as we were getting some tid-bits of viable information tossed into the Twitter-fray mixed in with the Tweets about snow levels, the nightmare that is Chuck E. Cheese, and the fact that I ran out of coffee at precisely 10:42am last Thursday. Riveting stuff to be sure.

Interesting Tweets are nonetheless bountiful. Some recent gems have included:

• @Seocracy’s ‘How to Spam Twitter’,
• @Status_Girl’s ‘Catch the Brainwaves Interview’ and
• @AndyBeal’s tinyurl link to his Google Cracks the Invisible Web post.

@Techcrunch tests out blog ideas and updates latest news to Twitter which means if you follow him, you are likely to hear about a Micro-hoo merger pretty early on. @Oilman has spun off in a whole new direction and has #TTwT (Train Talk with Todd) most rush hours Seattle time. Apart from the odd interesting tid-bit, hearing about Todd’s train companions can be downright hilarious, and he’s up to almost 400 followers in this twitter club already.

The different view points and opinions are also very interesting. @Doshdosh is pretty much a shoo-in on every post.

Ultimately, @MartinBowling has agreed to have a chat with me regarding some promo ideas for SEMCanada (I like to bounce ideas off people), and we are getting along really rather well. I’m really looking forward to meeting him in the flesh, and I didn’t know he existed (and vice versa) up to 6 weeks ago.

I have a teensy twitter following and likewise small number of people I follow compared to more active, more controversial, more interesting *ahem* Tweeple. Nonetheless, I have met a number of great folks on Twitter, and continue to meet more everyday. I have actively found a new speaker for the SEMCanada conference on Twitter, and gained a number of blog readers for SEMInsights. A number of the SEMI posts have had pretty decent Sphinns as a result. I also touched base with @MMcdonald and we may be fortunate enough to have WebProNews at SEMCanada (nothing is even remotely official, but Mike does know about it, and has asked me to get back to him in a month or two – so I’m excited!).

There are so many opportunities available on Twitter it’s great! It’s informal, but the ‘unstated’ rules of acceptable behavior are pretty air-tight; not rigid mind you, but definitively there. If you make an overt ass of yourself on a regular basis, have nothing worthwhile to say, are abusive or just plain mean, you’re probably not going to get too many followers as no-one wants their day affected with constant drivel or nastiness.

I’ll close this off with a few of my favorite Twitter related posts:

• @JenniferLaycock wrote a superb 5 part series on How to Use Twitter
• @Seocracy wrote about why he loves Twitter
• Twitter Use by Life Hack
• Power of Twitter for Reputation Management by distilled (this should have been longer imho, but what it says is valid)
• Follow and get followed by SEO folks here … based on Marketing Pilgrim’s starter post.

Or go to my twitter page and see who I follow, and see who they follow, and so on. Lee Odden, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis, and Carolyn Shelby are some of the other folks you might want to follow. Heck you can even follow Chuck Norris (with a pinch of salt – but it’s funny stuff :))

Happy Twittering!

Laura can be reached on laura at semcanada dot org
or followed on twitter dot com  / lauracallow
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