... and I'll pick Peter Pan over all the rest.
I've been asked what my favorite tool is for social media, what favorite site would be the last one I'd give up under duress. Without hesitation, it's Twitter. Find me at @rickcaffeinated on Twitter, and we'll start talking about anything you want - from social media theory to the Gamecocks kicking off the 2011 football season in two weeks. It's my water-cooler, my AOL chatroom for the 21st century, my Yahoo! emails lists with up to 140 characters a post. It's where I can learn and share and quote and gather. It's truly, for me, all that AND an awesome bag of chips.
- As of last night, I've had over 37K tweets, follow 3,776 other folks, and am followed by 3,479 entities as well. That's a whole lot of tweeting going on - the flow of information is constant, often overwhelming, often hard to keep up with - and still so rewarding for it's depth and richness. But that's just me.
- I highly recommend using lists to categorize and narrow your Twitter streams. Follow anyone you want. Follow back those who follow you first. And if it gets to be much more like a firehose than like a helpful stream, narrow it to a list so you can pay attention to the good stuff.
- I have a list of Twitter folks that's just local - it's my go-to list for any pertinent information here in town, and it helps me keep up with what's important closer to home. These are people who know the traffic because they're driving in it, who know the places to eat because they're going there for lunch, and who share their knowledge and expertise freely. So of course, I want to make sure I'm paying attention, right?
- WHO DO I FOLLOW? The first rule of thumb is to follow people who are talking about stuff you like to know. Hobbies, business interests, sports teams - use search.twitter.com to find other people talking about the things in which you're interested. Follow them, retweet them, ask them questions, give your own opinions and ideas.
- HOW DO I GET FOLLOWERS? The honest natural way is to look at the WHO DO I FOLLOW question above and do that. Folks will follow you back as part of their own experience when they see you also participating and be a being a consistent voice in the conversation. You can game the system, but that's crap.
- I use Hootsuite and Tweetdeck liberally to keep up with lists and with search columns. Twitter.com has its pros and cons, but third party apps have done a much better job helping with the curating and congregating of the various streams of data (Twitter actually owns Tweetdeck, so "3rd party" is more of a misnomer there). I use both of these services to do slightly different things, and both help me dig through the incoming information for a couple of the different hats I wear throughout the week. There are other apps that do similar things, but those two rise above the rest.
- As I'm writing, there's an article published online about Twitter's recent URL shortening changes [ht: @briansolis] - and analytics is the name of the game these days. Can you measure how many clicks are coming to your site on the internet? Can you tell where they're coming from, who's clicking and why? Measurement is a huge plus for anyone looking to add social media streams/tools to their business strategies, and Twitter appears to be trying to make some of this easier to manage.
- Follow the hashtags. Find out what's going on in your field of pursuit, and watch for the #--- verbiage being used to categorize those tweets. The #--- will automatically click to a search for that tag, and you can follow lots of folks talking about the same topic/event/conference/football team.
- Then there are Twitter Chats - distinct periods of time each week or so on certain topics that center around that chat's hashtag. I recommend the website TweetChat - login with your Twitter ID and follow whatever hashtag you want, and it will do the rest. Find those folks who are participating, too - answer questions, ask your own, and follow the smart kids in the room to learn more.
Those are just a few of the bulletpoints that pop to my head when answering the "Why do you like Twitter BEST?" question. For everything above, there are other apps to do some things, no apps to do others, and all kinds of alternative ways to get to the same conclusions. That's another reason I like Twitter: flexibility and endurance over the long haul.