Getting more involved with Twitter is a process of following people, being followed by others and making the occasional tweet (a post limited to 140 characters), or an ongoing stream of tweets if you are so inclined.
Some tweet frequently, others limit themselves to five tweets or less per day. I am in the latter catagory and tend to unfollow those who tweet more often (except news feeds and people of very special interest).
You start by opening an account and setting up your profile. You will find that people with products to advertise will soon start following you. You can block followers and I block those, unless their product or business is of real interest to me.
Some twitterers have the goal to build as large a following as possible. The way to do that is tweet away in random fashion to attract attention and hope the hundreds or thousands of people you follow will follow you back. I see that as a pointless exercise. I would rather have ten people with whom I am genuinely exchanging useful information than 10,000 followers who mean nothing to me and to whom I mean nothing in return.
When a new follower appears, I look to see who else he or she is following. Clicking on the profiles of my new follower's followers shows me the stream of tweets those people have posted. From that, I can decide if I want to follow my new follower and those who follow him or her.
From the first day on Twitter I have enjoyed the news feeds that come not only from certain mainstream sources I choose but also industry trade journals that I would otherwise not see.
More-recent pleasant surprises include the people that are finding, following and conversing with me (very short conversations, as in 140 character tweets). They include journalists who remember me from years ago when I was politically involved. Why they follow me now, I do not know, except maybe they are intrigued by Diane's and my transition out of politics into trucking. Or, with journalists losing their jobs in droves, maybe they are considering expediting as their next career.
Another surprise was a follower that surfaced from FedEx Headquarters in Memphis. I learned there are online marketing people there that regularly monitor FedEx mentions online. That can give you a big-brother syndrome if you let it. It also gives you the opportunity to become better known in a positive light by the powers that be at my carrier and my carrier's upline people.
I did not know before I got on Twitter just how much FedEx considers itself to be a networking and online service company. This is just one example of the things you can learn by being a twiterer.
There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to use Twitter. I don't use it for family or social networking. For me, it is a strictly business networking and education tool and a very good one at that. I learned this morning about the resource cited in my post
Making Productive Use of Your Down Time when I opened Twitter to see what was new.
