usercore

Twitter is useful as either a conversation you have among friends to share common experiences OR a professional conversation where you only talk about one thing.

I’ve been squatting on my personal twitter account for almost 3 years now.  I finally hooked up a client to alert me to tweets in real time.  After hooking that up, I promptly dropped a whole pile of professional acocunts I had been following for products or services I was interested in.  I dropped them because Twitterrific would keep popping up with some company saying stuff like “Good morning Twitterverse”.  Are you kidding me?  How annoying.  I assume these companies think they need to keep talking to keep their name in my face.  Well, there isn’t a single company I kept following that does stuff like this.  I don’t care how much I liked your product or service.

Don’t mix professional and personal tweets in your professional twitter account.

People who follow you professionally will end up dropping you if you throw too much fluff in there.

I’m guilty of getting too technical in my personal account.  I’ve tweeted when the fedex and ups api’s have been down.  I’m confident that 99% of the 30 people following my personal account don’t care about that.

So I’m going to stick to things on my personal account that may be of some interest to family and friends.  Any professional stuff needs to go elsewhere.

Personally I’ve started a twitter list for professional food related stuff in the Chicago area.  I’ve picked out mostly local folks who stick to talking about food almost all the time.  It’s something I’m passionate about and am excited to keep tabs on.  There’s some cool organizations and chefs which I’m not including in the list though because they’re mixing way too much personal in with the professional.  If half of my list is inside jokes and talk about what tv show they’re looking forward to, the list would get real boring, real quick.

I hope more and more professionals can catch on.  There’s some professional conversations I’m really interested in but don’t have the desire to put up with the noise that follows them.