I believe that what ruins twitter is the automation apps.

I’m pretty sure that everyone is busy but twitter is a communication tool (or at least that was the whole purpose of building it in the first place) of 140 chars and nothing else.

As always, everyone started seeing how to take advantage of the tool, of the high rankings, of the possibility to appear on Google’s results as a “micro-blog” and so on.

The addition of automated tools was not that bad in the beginning since you could just set up a feed and start looping your own blog or other boring stuff (quotes, jokes, news, trends, etc) but then everyone started ruining it.

I believe twitter works IF, and only IF… you use it like you were supposed in the beginning.

I have around one thousand followers, I only follow about half but that’s because many of those followers are bots (I can’t make them stop following me).

But if you look at my twitter stream you are definitely going to see that a person is tweeting EVERYTHING there.

I do RT’s of others, I RT useful content on the web, I write stupid things from time to time, I post my own blog updates (only once) and I actually TALK to people there.

If I see somebody starts following me, it is an egg, or a hot girl, follows 1,879 persons and only is being followed by 3, ALL the messages include an affiliate link or some crap like that…

Do you think whoever is behind that, is actually going to care about what you tweet?

No and I already know you agree (otherwise you wouldn’t have written this post in the first place)

So, dying or not, if twitter is used like it was supposed to, I think it is still viable to have it.

Sergio
Sergio Felix recently posted..Getting a Mentor, Gurus and Flying Solo

I can relate to that mate. When I first started on Twitter I used a program to automatically follow those that followed me but soon found that I had loads of followers that i had NOTHING in common with.

I then done a mass unfollow and got rid of loads of them. Now I manually select who I follow and only select people that share an interest.

I now see twitter in my top ten traffic sources every month

Barry
Barry Wells recently posted..I’m Going To Interview An Expert, Do YOU Have Any Questions You Need Answering?

Ocassionlly I use Twttrblogs. When I do with a few tweets and posts I easily can generate a couple of thousand views. Neither places do I have big followings.

Perhaps “reframing” your perspective of twitter as a tool could help. Mary

I got sick of the junk that came with following 50,000 people – it was relentless.

Plus, my DM folder was unusable because of all the spam in there so if anyone sent me a private message there was a good chance I’d miss it.

Now, by following less than 100 people so far, everything is a lot clearer and better organised and I am actually enjoying using Twitter again.

David

Thanks for coming over and leaving me a comment.

I take your points about Tweetdeck but I couldn’t use it after I got more than 10,000 followers – it just crashed my PC. I tried using Seesmic Desktop, which worked great, but having it open all the time so you don’t miss anything is distracting and I need to focus on my business.

Maybe it is a little self-serving but it’s no different to what 99% of the “celebrity tweeters” do. They have hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers who they just broadcast to with very little real interaction.

If I tweet out and people respond, then I am open to interaction. I am never going to miss an @reply, whether I am following that person or not. I can always re-follow someone who shows some interest in me and me in them.

David

Thanks for the comment – yeah, I’ve had plenty of hassle since unfollowing everyone. It’s not like I ever paid any attention to almost 100% of the tweets anyway, so people are not losing my attention by me unfollowing them.

I think it has its place and I am going to use it a lot more for networking rather than traffic, which was my previous objective.

David

I bought the “TweetTank” about 6 weeks ago thinking I could build quality relationships a little faster and do a little affiliate marketing as well.
Presently hovering at 2k people w/2 accounts. Problem is most of these folks are all auto tweeting 24/7, it’s mostly affiliate products being slammed at me – funny enough – lots of them for Tweet Tank!
Will Twittering hit the “balanced side of the pendulum”…..maybe in a year or??, at this point there’s sooo many programs out there stating: “Use Twitter to make your 5k a month+” – hard to say, though it may hit the wall pretty fast.
Also, like Austin above, I have over 6 thousand emails from 200 lists and spend at least 15-20 minutes daily, dumping hundreds thinking there are some great things I may just need in the future….ha!
It’s a true thinning out process – AND I’m getting 100+ new emails daily.
How does one deal with this when SO much SEEMS good?

Interested to see how your experiment goes.

Powerpaul
Rebuilding the site, so: twitter.com/thePowerpaul

The biggest problem is you will still have a large number of followers and you will be following few. This means you will be largely sending out one way signals into the Twittersphere. This seems a bit selfish or self serving. If you want to focus on a select group of people you can use tools like tweet deck to create groups, otherwise if you want to start over from scratch then it would be more ethical to close down your Twitter account and open a new one and start from zero.
.-= Gerald Weber´s last blog ..How To Do Keyword Research With EBay =-.

Good point. My stuff gets retweeted a lot for my niche – but it’s only about 20-40 times. That’s more than almost anyone else in my field – but it doesn’t result in a ton of extra traffic.

Ian
.-= Ian Brodie´s last blog ..Help Me Improve the Get Clients Blog! =-.