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For a long time when mentioning Twitter in one of my This Week Month In SEO posts a comment usually accompanied the mention along the lines “I still don’t care what you’re doing right now.” A funny thing happened in the last few days. I began to care. I started tweeting a couple of days ago and am quickly getting addicted. I thought I’d share some of my early impressions of Twitter.

Twitter seemed rather pointless to me from the outside. I figured there would be a lot more noise than signal and perhaps if you’re following the general public there is going to be too much noise to wade through. On the other hand if you can use a little discretion when choosing who to follow you’ll find a lot more signal than you might think.

I’ve seen a number of posts over the months about Twitter and had signed up sometime awhile back, but a few recent posts convinced me to start tweeting.

• A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers


• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners


• 75+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter

It was probably the weight of all the posts I’ve seen in recent months, but they all reached a tipping point within the last week.

I’m only a few days into Twitter and won’t even pretend to be an expert. In fact I’m barely sure what I’m doing at the moment, though I am learning and I do see quite a bit of potential in microblogging.

Early Impressions of Twitter

In no particular order here are a few thoughts on why I might need to sign up for Twitters Anonymous before long.

1. Easier to make connections - Something about the nature of the tweets removes a few barriers to networking. You don’t have to get someone to open your email. You can send a tweet directly @ them, though overusing this feature is surely a quick way to find yourself on the outside looking in. Tweeting also seems to be a good way to strengthen connections you made elsewhere.


2. Listen in on the conversation - Even if you don’t manage to connect with some you can still listen in on their conversations. Sure it’s a bit voyeuristic. but it can also be a great source of learning.


3. Quick feedback - It doesn’t take long for people to start responding to something you say. The feedback loop is very quick. Ideas you tweet can spread far in a short amount of time.


4. 140 char limit - Forces you to remove needless words from your writing. For someone like me who tends to write very long posts, having to keep tweets brief will hopefully refine the style of my blogging voice in a positive way.


5. Place to store random thoughts - A lot of random thoughts cross my mind during any given day. Most are long gone before I can make any use of them. Twitter offers a place to store and share your thoughts and the feedback loop above will give some clues about which of your ideas might spread and be well-received.


6. Branding - It’s another place to get your message out. Anywhere you maintain a presence is another place to build your brand.


7. Find information sooner - Twitter has a real time feel about it. Someone can share a thought and within a few seconds you can be acting on that thought. Being able to get to information a little sooner than everyone else has a lot of advantages.

Again it’s still new to me and each of the above points has likely already been said in more detail by someone other than me. Once I’ve gotten more used to how Twitter works I’ll be able to expand on some of the thoughts above. For now those are my quick and early impressions.

If you’re interested in learning more about Twitter I highly recommend Caroline Middlebrook’s Big Juicy Twitter Guide, which I read through last weekend. Caroline if you see this how about a PDF version of the guide?

Caroline has some great tips for using Twitter and links to a variety of tools you can use instead of having to go directly to the site. I chose to use the Twitbin extension for Firefox since I always have Firefox open. There are several other tools and you can also send and receive tweets from your phone via SMS.

Vanessa Fox has also written a great post complete with podcast with helpful advice and links to more resources.

My extremely quick guide is to simply sign up and start following some people you know or some people who you think will have interesting things to say. If you want to follow me you can find me at twitter.com/vangogh. I can’t claim to be the most interesting Twitterer to follow at the moment, but I will try to get there soon and if I know you I’ll gladly follow you back.

Andy’s list of 75+ Marketing gurus is a good place to look for more. The list has now passed 200 mark and counting. If that seems like too many people to find and follow try the tool Rob created at Seocracy to start following a lot of people at once. Thanks Rob.

I’m guessing my quick infatuation with Twitter will fade over time, but hopefully as it does I’ll have become a more mature Twitterer and will be contributing a lot more signal than noise.

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