Pondering the best way to apply the wealth of social media to establish, build and manage my personal brand, I found myself reconsidering my use of twitter. @accone has logged a paltry 840 tweets over two years, barely one a day.
Why is that? 140 characters is hardly a major commitment, right? Plus it and Instagram seem so much better suited to a busy life often spent in moments versus spans.
After some reflection, studying successful tweeters, I realized it’s because I’d applied an unrealistic and irrelevant ‘publication bar’ on what I felt was worthy of tweeting. I was using the same benchmark as I applied to my blog and more rigorously, to when I wrote a weekly newspaper column, which is to say it had to be a post of substance worthy of the time it would take to read it.
Wrong! I’d neglected the fact that a tweet takes seconds to consume. Tweeting or microblogging is a medium where the spaces in between matter as much as the punctuation of posts.
Just like a hamburger patty benefits from a few choice ingredients other than ground beef, so too your twitter presence won’t hang together if you only tweet occasionally. Frequency and substance are in a dynamic tension.
So now I have to get comfortable with what my filler will be. Breadcrumb trails of viral links? The beaten egg of more frequent personal thoughts? A spun sugar blizzard of retweets?
Ingredients yet unknown, but I trust you’ll let me know if it’s working or not.
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