This is part of an ongoing series, see part 1

Twitter is a newish medium, and it is still growing and changing very rapidly.  I could go on and on about how in the last year alone twitter has grown by 10 times, how the simple convention of “@ replies” and hashtags (a word preceded with a #) were developed independently by users and now @ replies are part of the official twitter interface and program.  As such many, many surprising things are happening on twitter.  One of the twitter founders even gave a TED talk about it. So yes there is a lot happening there, but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

Just today I had someone follow me on twitter.  They were very good about customizing their twitter page, added a bio, a real name, even a location.  They didn’t choose to show their face, but rather an image they felt conveyed the image they were trying to project, that is OK, but still not what I wold recommend.  They even customized the background image of the page and the colors of the fonts etc.  It actually looks quite good.  They made a few mistakes though:

1. They followed over ONE THOUSAND people in a short period of time
2. They haven’t updated their status AT ALL.
3. They crammed too much in and used all caps.

Let’s run it down by the numbers.  You can’t possibly interact with that many people that quickly in any meaningful way.  IF you hoped to just drive a few hits to your website and you don’t really plan on participating on twitter you are essentially a spammer.  You are not welcome, go away, no one wants that. This is like inviting 1000 people you don’t know to a party, but it’s at a public park and all you have there is a sign telling people to go somewhere else. The party metaphor is a powerful one, I recommend reading this if you are interested.  In what twitter calls a “one line bio” they tried to add way too much information, and then half of it is in all capital letters.  This is akin to shouting, and most people think shouting is rude. So essentially if you are being genuine in your efforts and are not a spammer you’ve sent way too many people to no where, been rude to them, and add no value at all to their lives.

Next up we’ll talk about what to twitter.