I don’t want to use twitter
Let me tell you why

There I’ve said it. Unlike everything you hear nowadays from those in the know about social media
I do not want to use twitter.
At least not the way everyone else does.

I don’t think I’m much of a renegade by thinking differently about twitter, but I do believe that by doing so I’m using it for what it was intended for (which is
different than the way almost all marketers do).

See most marketers don’t use twitter. It uses them!

It uses up their time and it uses up their attention.
To top it all off, they don’t build real relationships with all of their followers even though twitter is known for building lists of followers at record speeds.
Sure list building on twitter is intense, but how good is your list? Do these people even know you? like you? trust you?

Recent surveys show 40% of all twitter activity is spam. Even if that’s a worse case scenario, you have to admit that there’s way too much information.
Way way too much

The word is out and I’m not the only some that senses this can’t go on for long. Some serious marketers and gurus have even said that they want to reduce their following to the bare minimum, so they can manage it all.

I’ve already talked about information overload being the #1 hurdle people face online (look back in the July archive to find that post or click here). Well,
twitter is information overload in the extreme.
It’s packed full of tweets, retweets, followers, direct messages. The most popular twitter application is tweetdeck, trying to make sense of it all.

Twitter IS the greatest branding and relationship building tool on the planet, but it’s not used that way. Instead,
you barely see what all of your followers are doing, you barely have time to read what the people you follow are doing, and there’s so much of it that it’s eating away at any time you have.

You have so many “friends” online, you really don’t know any of them. What sort of a relationship are you building with them anyway? That’s one of the major flaws in how almost all marketers treat social media today.

Listen, I’m all for finding a small group of like minded individuals you can really talk to, people you can help, people you can partner with…
BUT
how do you find them amongst the millions of others?

When you go to a really loud freakish hot party, out of a room crammed with people, how do you find those few that you can truly befriend and really talk to? Everyone’s drinking, dancing their tail off and you can barely see.
How do you find your friends?

Online, this party has Information overload. That’s an analogy of the problem with twitter right now.

I’m doing something different. Think about it for a second – what if your twitter experience looked like this scenario:

• You use automation to reach as many targeted people as you can
• Prescreen them by only answering dm’s (direct messages) that look as if someone actually wrote them for you and not some canned response
• This is you hyper responsive list of people that you can really build a lasting relationship with
• Keep talking to your real online group anyway you can – emails, phone, chat, skype…

If you do this you’ll be working with a lot less people. And your hyper responsive list will grow slooooooooowly.

Even so, by taking it slow you’ll be going a lot faster.

By picking out only those hyper responsive to you, you get a tighter list with a fraction of the people of your main following but, and this is bug but,
they all know you, like you and trust you.

As my mentor Alex Jeffreys likes to say – you’re better off with a small list of people that know you than with a huge list of people that don’t.

Of course you need an application to help you otherwise you’d be doing this all day long and let’s face it, you really signed up for this internet marketing thing to spend less time in front of a computer.

But let’s forget the application for now.

So how about you? Do you agree with me?
Tell me – Are you going to change the way you use twitter?