How To Lose Me As a Twitter Follower

OK, so I've often been a critic of Twitter. I've been using it a bit more lately, and find that it can be a useful business, P.R. and news tool.

As I've lived it a little more, I've found my personal pet peeves about Twitter. They are the things that can drive me to unfollow someone.

1) Too personal - I'm a business tweeter. Talk about your favorite TV shows on Facebook, for God's sake. I don't care what you ate for dinner, or are stuck in traffic. Buh-bye.

2) High-volume, Low-value - so if you tweet 10 times in 15 minutes, a few things happen for me. First, you are drowning out other people on my screen. Second, I can't tell which thing you've written is important. Usually if you say 10 things in 10 minutes, I find none of them are important. (Breaking news eyewitnessing is the sole exception). Buh-bye.

3) TOTD & QOTD - OMG, I am sooooo sick of Quote of the Day, Thought of the Day tweets. I am intelligent and so most of my friends and network are too. I like new information (find me a great article, or resource, for instance). If I see one more "Deep Thought" I am going to puke. Buh-bye.

What causes *you* to unfollow someone? Your Google Guy would like to know!

Best, Peter
Search Engine Marketing for Therapists
Follow my low-volume, high-value Tweets on Twitter!

A Therapist's Basic Guide to Twitter - Part One, What is Twitter?

TGIF fellow therapists,

If you have not been hearing about Twitter lately, then you must be living under a rock. Twitter is definitely a hot topic right now, and is growing at an insane rate. So, what is this thing, and why would a therapist in private practice care? Well, let's start simple.

Twitter can most accurately be described as a micro-blog. As a Twitter user, you post updates of up to 140 characters. Reading different Twitter users, you'll see that the posts range from small personal news (what restaurant they are at, what band they are seeing) to online news articles or websites that they found interesting and wanted to share. 

It really brings together aspects of Facebook's status update, and the editorial filtering/spinning of blogs. The difference between it and Facebook is that any user can see your postings (unless you lock down privacy options), and people can search on keywords and see previous posts of yours. So this is more public, like a blog. Also, just as in both Facebook and a blog, people "follow" people they find interesting (so that they see their posts automatically).

Like a blog, the posting of links is definitely part of the culture. People are culling the web for you, and saying "take a look at this". All in short little posts called "tweets".

To see an example of a Twitter account and tweets, take a look at my Twitter page - serving both my counseling and web consulting businesses.

In my next posts, I'll get into how I think you can use a Twitter account for your business, and some of the finer details of this medium.

On to the weekend! Best, Peter