Recent 20, Managing First Impressions on Twitter
My friend Sal posted a unique tip for using Twitter favorites as a way to learn more about people. He noticed his own behavior of using others’ favorites to better get to know them. Simple, and different than most of the tips out there. Sal’s a good thinker and this is a perfect example of a tip that separates itself from the noise.
Here’s one I’ve been using myself recently, and I thought I’d share.
I noticed that when I check someone out, I look only at the first page of their stream. I’m busy, and I wonder how I’ll keep up with following too many more people, so I like to check to see if what the person says is something that would add value for me to hear.
That got me thinking, how do I look to busy people? I mean, I’ve got two blogs, and bunch of internal-to-Progress stuff, and a very long list of favorites for people who want to take the time to get to know me. What about that first impression? Other than my hair, what do people notice about me right away that would make them want to click ‘follow’?
I keep an eye on my last 20 tweets or so – that seems to be the number that displays on my twitter home page by default. I look at the balance – how many are silly personal tweets so that people can realize I’m a person? How many are meaty content? How many replies are there? I like to interact with people, so I value replies in others quite a bit. It lets me know a person will be willing to converse with me.
Thinking of your stream this way makes sure you have a high percentage if good value content on your core topic. Managing that balance using the context of the most recent 20 means that whenever someone happens to take a glance, you make a good first impression.
The Favorite feature is useful but I often wish that Twitter would add “categories.” Wouldn’t it be cool if you could tag a tweet into a category and then have the category names appear on the right-side menu of your Twitter home page? Even if they limited the number of categories, say 5 different categories, it would go a long way to providing a capability for a new visitor to quickly determine your interests.
A few weeks back I changed my Twitter Bio to highlight my Favorites:
Bio Technology Manager. Checkout my Twitter Favorites for examples of my interests and background.
It’s a simple statement and hopefully it will re-direct some new visitors to the information that I’d like them to see first.
Regards,
Sal.
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Salvatore Saieva