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.