Russell yeah definitely you can link to your blog posts on twitter, I see a lot of people doing it and I do so myself (I’m @MichaelJW if you want to connect, by the way). But you can’t get away with *only* tweeting your own stuff — who wants to listen to the guy who only talks about himself?

The twitter gurus say the rule of thumb is 90%+ sharing and communicating, ~10% linking to your own stuff (and then only if it’s actually useful/interesting to the people that follow, of course).

Juuso you’re totally right that two benefits are increased traffic and networking. But there’s one other big thing you’re missing, and that’s letting other people find out more about YOU.

( You can call it personal branding or self marketing if you like :P )

Why bother writing your thoughts about piracy, or doing an April fool’s prank, or posting the little games you made recently? *Technically* they’re not incredibly useful, but actually they are, because (apart from any entertainment value) they let people feel like they know you, so you don’t just seem like some faceless corporation trying to sell them something.

Naturally some people go too far with this, break the 90% rule, and imagine everyone cares about them *so much* that they want to know about every little thing they’re doing. Um, no.

…oh and I just noticed you wrote a new post on twitter. So I will go and read that now :P

I know that there can be one good reason for Twittering (or well, enabling OTHERS to twitter about you):
- website traffic

It’s also a pretty interesting way to find interesting people – and to network with them. Whether or not that’s beneficial in a long run is up to you.

That still doesn’t mean that Twittering would be anything useful though.

After all, technically Twitter is a “almost realtime public chat with the people you choose”. Bit like public IRC, with different filtering/tag mechanism.

I see almost no point in trying to follow what other people are saying. It’s simply too much waste of time when everybody and their mom are talking about how they are “going to sleep” or “drinking water” or “watching tv”. You really gotta pick carefully who to follow… and I’d personally prefer following RSS feeds.

I’m going to try it out (again) and see if anything useful comes out of it. (using Tweetdeck by the way – it makes it much better user experience to have some sort of client).

Havi Brooks wrote an awesome article on what Twitter is actually about: http://www.fluentself.com/blog/stuff/twitter-demystified-the-great-debunking-begins/

I really recommend reading that if you want to know what all the fuss is about :)

For that reason I’ve kept from Twittering. However, recently I’ve considered giving it a try, but ONLY for professional purposes. I’ve already posted this link to the forums, but here is the lecture that has recently changed my mind… “Evangelizing Yourself”, by Whitney Hess:

http://www.slideshare.net/whitneyhess/evangelizing-yourself-1184852

I recommend it, if you have the time, and are interested in reasons and ways to increase your visibility in you field.

However, as with anything new on the internet I feel that twitter is starting to get saturated with marketers, spammers, boring news feeds – heck just “noise” in general.