Life Lessons I Learned From Twitter
This morning as I noticed that I now have 500 Twitter followers, I can’t help but feel compelled to talk about the massive effect that Twitter has had on me in the 2 months that I’ve been using it. I feel that Twitter has helped make me a more effective communicator and has opened my eyes to some very important principles. So today I’d like to share a few universal life lessons that I’ve learned from Twitter:
Everything can be expressed in 140 characters or less. If you’re like me, you tend to turn quick notes into full blown essays. But what I’ve learned from Twitter (which has a limit of 140 characters per status update) is that virtually everything in life can be expressed in 140 characters. And even more, most things should be expressed in 140 characters or less. If an important client sends you a quick note and you reply in 2 sentences instead of 20, a few things are accomplished: You don’t waste time writing more than you need to, the recipient doesn’t waste time reading it, the reader still gets the answer they were looking for and you sound more powerful. There’s a sense of power in saying: “See you then.” that cannot be achieved with “Oh yeah, that sounds great! I’m looking forward to it… Oh and ….and also….and…..”.
Everybody Likes to be @ed. When you tweet that you just ate at Burger King and someone and says “@yourusername – I love Burger King too!” you like that person from then on. You respect them, you pay attention to them and you look for opportunities to @ them back. The fact that they took the time to recognize you and your interests is something you value. The problem is, we @ people a lot more on Twitter than we do in real life. Why is this? And as much as people like being @ed on Twitter, they like it a lot more in real life. Think about how you can @family @clients @friends. Would it make a difference if you started “@ing” your past clients more often?
Trust, friendships, and followers are built through contribution. If you’ve been using Twitter for long, you have undoubtedly noticed spammers adding you. You view their profile and they have 1 update and are following 12,000 people. Does this pay off? Have they built meaningful relationships with the people they’re following? NO! I see this as another representation of the real world. Sure, you can cold call everyone in the phone book or send an email to 100,000 addresses at once, but without the individual relationships to support that contact, it’s likely to fail. Another way this could be seen is in terms of contribution. If that spammer had instead taken the time to update their account with interesting, informative, meaningful tweets for a few months and slowly started adding & engaging other users, they would have been hugely successful at promoting their business. Instead, they tried to take a shortcut and their account was quietly ignored by everyone.
And, of course, you can follow me @realspace and if you like this post, feel free to tweet it out!
Finally, I stick by what I say, and I did claim that everything can be expressed in 140 characters or less, so…let’s try re-wording this entry:
Life lessons I learned from Twitter: everything can be said in 140 char., people like to be recognized & you can’t shortcut contribution!
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Hi Andrew…
I’m relatively new to twitter and I’m loving saying what I have to say in 140 characters or less. Twitter really does impact my day and open my eyes to some new thoughts and ideas! There are life lessons to be learned. Glad to be following you!