There's nothing like tweeting about blogging and blogging about tweeting to beat a dead horse into the ground, eh?

Guess what?

I'm doing it anyway.

Last week a friend messaged me on BlackBerry messenger about something, I don't remember the exact context, but somewhere along the line I decided to send him a link in a direct message (DM) via Twitter, and realized he wasn't following me. So I asked him why, and he said he was "trying a different approach to his Twitter strategy" and he unfollowed a lot of people in order to reduce the noise in his stream. His logic was that if he wanted to talk to me, see what was up with me lately, etc., we're connected on Facebook and of course, BlackBerry messenger.

I can respect that.

However, it spurned an interesting conversation about "Twitter strategies." People put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to best use this tiny tool of epic proportions. Ari Herzog has been experimenting with it and documenting his findings, which, from an analytical perspective, is very interesting.

People ask me what my Twitter strategy is quite a bit. To my knowledge, I've never really divulged the details of what it is in writing, until now.

Are you ready? After the jump, you'll find out my own personal Twitter strategy. (If you came here on a direct link, you won't see the "Read more" thing.)

I don't have one.

You read that right - I don't have a Twitter strategy. I think putting that much time and thought into a fun little tool is silly. Note that I am talking about for personal use and not necessarily if you maintain a Twitter account for a business or organization. Even still, there's only one rule I abide by:

Be yourself.

That's it.

I have no agenda, I just tweet random stuff that comes out of my brain. I share things I find interesting, whether they're blog posts, pictures, or LOLcats. Yes, I auto-populate stuff to Twitter, like my FourSquare check-ins and YouTube favorites, and even on the rare occasion that I do update this blog, but overall? I'm just me. I'll share with you random thoughts, rants things that bug me, I like to point out absurdities and quote things that I overhear. I just find it fun, and have had some great conversations using Twitter and through it have met some incredible people, both online and off. I ReTweet stuff other people have shared if I like it.

How do I decide who/what to follow?

I have a special folder in one of my inboxes that filters all email from Twitter.com into it, so that's where my new follower notifications go. When I have time, I go through each one, click the person's name, go to their profile, and take less than three seconds to decide whether or not I'm going to follow them back.

My only criteria for deciding are my answers to these two questions:

1) Does this person seem interesting?

and/or

2) Can I learn something from this person?

That's it.

I used to make a point to follow a lot of social media/public relations/marketing people, but after a while, the echo-chamber-ness got to be too much. I try to follow fewer of the type of people in my field and more people that have nothing to do with it whatsoever. It's those people that I find most interesting. Recently I started following some astronauts, some fake (parody) celebrities, some indie bands, a baseball team, some random brands, etc. I want to see how they use the service, and I want to learn something from them. Sometimes, I just want to laugh.

Once in a while, I use a third-party app to mass-unfollow the accounts that have fallen dormant or spammy. Rarely do I unfollow anybody manually. You've got to be super spammy or somehow really offend me to get me to unfollow you, and since it's pretty hard to offend me (I'm pridefully un-PC), that doesn't happen often.

So there ya go. That's my "Twitter strategy," or lack thereof. Now stop thinking so much about the tool and just have fun.