Tips for using Twitter and not getting overwhelmed

About a week ago at work one of my coworkers saw the Twitter window at my desk. And he asked me “what do you use twitter for, I have tried this about an year ago, but it seemed just another way of fooling around and wasting time. And not to mention the distraction it brings to your desk.”

Well I gave him an honest answer and I am going to share with you what I told him -I do find twitter overwhelming in the beginning. And I used to spend a lot of my time reading tweets and participating in open discussions. Though I was spending a lot of my time on twitter, I would still not say it was a time waste. If you are following the right people and know the right tools, you can accumulate a lot of knowledge and can use twitter to expand your business by developing relationships.

e.g. If you are a startup blogger and you know nothing about online marketing, I would suggest you go to http://twitter.grader.com/search here you can search other users specialized in your niche and can interact with them directly, so you can search for online marketing in our case. Most of the times users on twitter are very helpful and knowledgeable.

@problogger, @shoemoney, @mashable are some of the users that I have been following even before I started blogging.

I’ve also found that Twitter isn’t something you can explain, and it’s not something you can understand until you’ve used it for at least a few days. You have to use it to get it.

Follow a very Moderate approach

When I first started using Twitter I’d wake up in the morning and try to read through all the tweets, or at least scan them. Then I’d try to keep up periodically throughout the day. It was stressful. And i was falling back on a lot of other important tasks.

So remember DO NOT TRY TO KEEP UP

Twitter will be there for you and you can login anytime to find all the useful tweets, don’t sit there refreshing your screen to wait for more tweets, you can use twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/) to go through all the tweets that you have missed at any time of the day.

Follow people that you can learn from

Don’t follow people simply because they follow you back. Also by following a lot of people you will fed with a lot of not so useful information which defeats the very purpose of you using Twitter, unless you have some other good reason.

Don’t be on Twitter all the time

Personally I always had hard time concentrating on other tasks if my twitter window is open. So like I said, I close it most of the time and open it a few times a day to see what’s going on. And to market my BLOG links or any other affiliations that make sense to me.

There should be a Full Stop on your tweets

Make sure you don’t tweet whole day long. Your followers might get annoyed and might stop following you. Tweet only about something that makes sense.

Reduce the number of feeds and emails.

If you use Twitter regularly, you can probably reduce your need for RSS (my favorite blogs are on Twitter anyways), email (you can DM people), IM, news sites, and so on. It’s nice to consolidate, as long as you use it intelligently. This will help in saving a lot of time by replacing a lot of stuff with twitter.

Twitter is a wonderful tool if used right. Wish you all the best for your tweets. Please leave any further comments or suggestions about using Twitter effectively and not wasting a whole lot of time while tweeting.

Follow me on Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/coolwebdev