My 15 Day Experiment: Twitter VS. Associated Content

I'll be honest: I hated the idea of Twitter and so had been avoiding the website for ages. I'd been a blogger via my online diary circa 1997 before anyone know what blogging was, and I'd already been through the Myspace shift, where users started switching over to Facebook and their friends had no choice but to leave one wasteland behind to move on to new frontiers. I don't like MySpace all that much, nor do I like Facebook, since you know if my mom's using the site it's not exactly hip anymore. So, Twitter, I figured was going to be just as bad, possibly worse, since it's reasonable to call a twitter user a "twit," defined as "a foolish or annoying person."

Did I want to be the person who tweeted about the quality of my sleep last night, the weather, or what I was making for dinner just so I could, in a sense, feel connected to the other lonely souls out there? I did not.

Still, I could definitely use a new laptop, since my current one gets so hot when it's in use that one's lap is hardly an appropriate surface for its fiery death cry; I'm surprised my desk hasn't caught fire yet. I'm actually a little afraid to use it. So I signed up for Twitter and even allowed the site to email every single person from my contacts list, even the people I'd rather not follow me, like my jerk ex-landlord, the former roomie who may or may not have robbed our old apartment, or the person I went out with on one date before I decided that guys who liked to be hog-tied are probably not my type. Within minutes, I had a handful of followers, a number which grew steadily throughout the last two weeks to the princely 67 followers I have now. (Want to follow me? Check out http://twitter.com/LiteraryTease)

Who are these people who follow me? I wasn't sure, but I was sure they needed something better to do than follow me on Twitter, so I decided to post links to my content on Associated Content as seemed appropriate. Since I'd quickly grown majorly annoyed with the people who use Twitter solely to promote themselves (or the new, super amazing tooth whitening systems that they are trying to sell), I decided to let the links to my content become a mostly organic process.

So if I tweeted about the rotten milk in my coffee this morning-gross-then later, I might post a link to the article I wrote about Cheap Milk Prices and Friendly Farms. If I tweeted about my craving for chocolate, maybe my next tweet would be a link to my short story, Sweet Tooth.

But I made sure not to only post links to content, because I was pretty sure that wouldn't encourage anyone to check out my stuff. I'd be just as bad as the tooth whitening people! So in addition to posting links to my articles, I tweeted about the crazy traffic in Providence, the homeless guy who approached me the other night, and other completely random things about my day or my life. I made a sincere effort to tweet every day, even if, on the day I was sick, I only wrote "My tummy hurts." It's been two weeks, and I've made 188 tweets.

I do want to note that I clicked a few links to allow AC to automatically update my twitter feed, but it didn't start working until two days ago, and it posted about 25 links, since I've been writing a lot of AC content in the last month. I didn't like that, because I'm sure it was annoying for my followers to see one link after another. Also, I'm sure it's counterintuitive to post 25 links at once, since who's going to bother clicking through all of those? It makes more sense to me to post one link every day or so, or maybe every couple of tweets, depending on how much to tweet. I'm going to switch off that service today.

Another thing I will note is that I made sure NOT to follow the people who were following me unless I felt like they might genuinely have something to say. It's taking me a while to click through all of my followers, but I'd rather foster a genuine connection that be followed person #412,301 on someone's list. I found a few people who did have interesting things going on, and I made sure to respond to their tweets. A few of the interesting folks I follow are:

http://twitter.com/DBlasczak

http://twitter.com/PeopleofWalmart

http://twitter.com/bloodbathbeyond

http://twitter.com/Lovebettie

What's particularly interesting is that ever since I started using Twitter, my traffic on AC increased significantly. I went from 200 page views a day, or less, to averaging 700 page views a day in the last few weeks. In fact, I increased from Clout 6 to Clout 8 during the experiment, which is pretty darn awesome, if you ask me!

I've been getting a few more comments on my work, which is always nice, and I'm seeing an increase in traffic earnings. Not bad for a few minutes of tweeting every day. Will I continue with Twitter now that the experiment is done? Yes, I suppose I will. Call me a twit if you dare...