My First Year with Twitter
Earlier this year, March 4 to be exact, I opened a Twitter account, out of curiosity about what it could do and wanting to learn more about social media. I had a few friends who were on Twitter and I started off having one-on-one exchanges with them. Then I began tweeting to let people know when I posted a new blog. Slowly but surely, Twitter has become one of the first sites I visit in the morning when I sit down at my desk. I made a number of new friends, and many of the people I follow have become one of my primary sources of information about healthcare, marketing, communications, ethics, business policy—all the things that I need to stay relevant in my work. I am not a “high profile” user with hundreds and thousands of followers, but perhaps next year I’ll aspire to becoming a Brand or Maven or Mensch as described by Guy Kawasaki.
What I really like about Twitter is the openness. Unlike on LinkedIn or Facebook, for example, most Twitter users welcome new followers. In most cases you can start following someone right away. Out of curiosity, the people you choose to follow may follow you back, and vice versa. This is how I’ve made most of my “friends” on Twitter. Even though I’ve never met many of them, I feel like many of them are friends after seeing each person’s picture next to his or her tweet almost every day. By contrast, LinkedIn is most useful to me when I want to look up someone I know and reconnect with them. Ditto Facebook.
The catch is that some people who sign up as followers have ulterior motives. Here is what I mean. Many people consider followers on Twitter more or less as assets. The more followers you have, the broader your reach. At the very minimum I suppose it confers bragging rights. Taking this to the extreme, you can “buy” followers. (I have lost track of the link to information about how this can be done.) Another strategy sometimes used is to sign up as a follower, ostensibly, to as many different Twitter users as possible, knowing that some will reciprocate. I discovered how this worked by accident, when I observed that, at times, when a follower signs up and I don’t reciprocate, I get dropped in short order.
If you’re not already on Twitter and want to give it a try in 2010, I highly recommend it! And here are a few interesting people to consider following. Most of them are in the healthcare space.
http://twitter.com/ChristianeTrue
http://twitter.com/EdBennett
http://twitter.com/rilescat
http://twitter.com/Phrmageddon2012
http://twitter.com/kevinmd
http://twitter.com/FierceBiotech
http://twitter.com/scotthensley
http://twitter.com/pharmalot
http://twitter.com/ThisIsSethsBlog
http://twitter.com/GuyKawasaki
http://twitter.com/cityofparis (that’s me!)