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There has been a lot of talk and excitement around Twitter recently, it all reach a new high when Oprah Winfrey dedicated a portion on her television program to Twitter. Some stats that followed the airing of the show indicated that as much as 1 million new users signed up to Twitter. Stats that followed after the Oprah Effect died down indicated that as much as 60 percent of new users don’t use the service after a month.
I can attest that this was true for me too! I joined Twitter before they went mainstream, before the most celebrities ever heard of it, and before it was a marketeer next marketing gimmick. What I came to realize is that when you first join a new community, at first you just lurk until you feel comfortable with the acceptable behavior in the community and the functionality of the service. This is definitely true in developing communities before the trolls and marketeers arrive.
The Twitter community has matured to shape features in the site, such as the @username reply mechanism and search friendly #hashtags. And Twitter is still evolving to meet users demands. But what will help you get the most out of Twitter has nothing to do with technology, but finding your tweet voice. Find your tweet voice, tune it, and experiment with it especially since Twitter makes it so easy. Don’t take the ‘What are you doing?’ question asked by Twitter too literal, use it as a suggestion, an ice breaker. Instead ask yourself, how am I going to change my world? What is my value add? Who am I going to connect with today? What matters to me the most?
Once you find your voice, you will need to find people to follow. The trick I like to use is I follow those that people I trust follow. For example, follow the folks that celebrities follow. All the mobile, desktop, and web clients to Twitter make it easy to always stay tune to your followers, use the favorite feature to save tweets that are interesting to you, reply and retweet to tweets add value to the conversation.
The key to twitter is to find followers and find hour voice.