Twitter can be utilized in various ways:  for support; comms & PR; news & information; knowledge base (peer to peer); entertainment – the list goes on and on. But how many times do you go onto Twitter and end up really disappointed with what you see?

I don’t think it is due to heavy usage akin to Facebook that is leading to unhappiness. Instead the disappointment is usually around responses and having to sift through the rubbish that is Twitter. Perhaps I don’t use the platform correctly.

Your usage of Twitter will obviously differ between business and personal but in this article lets take the view of the consumer or average Joe: me!!!

Human nature

Human nature means that people are more likely to complain about something compared to saying positive things. So there may be times when I look to Twitter (or Facebook for that matter) to complain about a product or service or to get general support if I can’t find it elsewhere.

However. for the most part, I use Twitter for the main purpose of learning and sharing. I’ve been using Twitter on and off since my stunningly interesting first post back in June 2007:

@jabba_29: waiting for the missus and then going to have dinner

Sharing

But sharing the hugely insightful goings on in my personal life is not all. Sharing links to peers and information they share is more of my thing at the moment. Especially with the @JBatEZY account.

I know I could share more, but my time is scarce and, dare I say, I have more important things to do with my spare time. I try to (re)tweet at least once a day from this account – hopefully adding something to the community. Back in the day I found Twitter really useful for getting good links and finding other peers in my field of interest at the time – web analytics.

Quality degradation

As time went on, and as my focus area moved a bit more towards Social Media, the quality of the tweets lessened and more and more irritating traits appeared such as:

• The “I’m so important I’m going to make sure you’re real” auto responder to validate your interest in following a person – sod that!
• The auto-responder where you go their website and are asked to sign up on a newsletter or similar – again sod that!
  • I’ll sign up on my own terms. I’m following you already. I’ll get further info as and when I need it.
• The auto response that asks you to give “kred” or “klout” ratings… Oh come on!
• The endless amount of links that point to the same thing. Perhaps these are thinly disguised with a leading paragraph or so describing how great the resource being linked to is.
• Link bait .. oh wait!! 😀

Autoresponses

As you can see, most of the gripes are about auto responses. I know that it is good SM/Twitter etiquette to respond to your new following but are these auto responders the answer? I’ve asked around a few people and they don’t know how effective they really are.

What do you think?

@EzyInsights is still young in terms of following and can manually respond to new followers, How do you deal with new followers? Do you interact with them to make sure they are still interested in you?

You can follow me on the following accounts, and I promise I won’t spam you back. But you can feel good in the knowledge that I appreciate your following 🙂

• @JBatEZY & @JBatSKIFFIE (personal: tech, music, movies, general rubbish)