Tweet your Personality

Problem: Do you find Twitter silly or overwhelming? You created an account and never came back to it? Do you think “Why the heck should I follow people I don’t know?” or “Who are these people and why are they stalking me”?  You think you don’t need to know what John Doe in the opposite part of the world ate for dinner? You don’t own a business or blog and have no need to advertise them on Twitter? You don’t know what to tweet about?

If you answered yes to one of these questions above, you have reached the right post. I am not going to motivate you to use Twitter but give you some tips on how to get started with Twitter with the least efforts and have Twitter automatically build your online personality.  ‘Cos when I started out I was like you.

Solution:

Use Twitter not to let the world know what you ate for dinner or how you got drunk at a party. Tweet about things that will represent you to the world, tweet your public personality. Just the way organizations and corporations are using Twitter to build and maintain their brand image, use Twitter to build your personal brand image. So that tomorrow if someone googles you, your Twitter account shows up and the things that you have discussed or spoken about are visible to the world. Yes, it means talk sense, have an opinion and know what you are talking about.  How can you do it? Are you too lazy?The solution I have does not require you to manually tweet anything. All that you do (good ) automagically gets tweeted and builds your personality.

1. What do I tweet? (Automagically feed your tweets): Most of us read or view a lot of things online everyday like news, blogposts, youtube videos etc. Wouldn’t it be cool that every time you read, viewed or heard something and liked it you could click a button and it would get tweeted.

Tweet what you read: First, if you don’t have a RSS reader, get one. It lets you view posts, news, videos etc from one place. You won’t have to go to multiple sites. For example, I use Google reader. In Google reader I searched for my interests like technology, puzzles, news, movies, recipes etc and subscribed to blogs and news sites that write about my interests. When viewing the feeds in the reader I click the star button to favorite the posts I liked. My starred google reader f eed is public and synched with a twitter app called Twitterfeed. What Twitterfeed does is tweets my starred posts automatically, periodically. Here is a detailed post on how to tweet your starred google reader items.

Tweet what you listen to: If you like streaming music online use Blip.fm to tweet what song you are currently listening to automatically. If you use iTunes, you can set your Twitter status to the current song or podcast you are listening to on iTunes using this script through Twitterific (if you are on your iPhone) or TwittyTunes.

Tweet what you view:

Videos: Use Google reader to subscribe to your favorite video channels or most popular videos on youtube. This is how you can access youtube’s rss feeds. Use the same technique (as described in step 1) to star your video feeds and hence automatically post them through Twitterfeed.

Photos: You can use Twitpic to take a photo from your mobile and tweet it instantly. If you are a Flickr user, you can also use Twitterfeed to post photos from Flickr to Twitter.

2. Who do I follow? : A lot of my friends lose interest in Twitter because that they don’t know who to follow.While there are some apps to help you choose who to follow like  Twitterholic: (shows top Twitter users), Twubble and Mr.Tweet (both look up your current friends and suggests more people to follow),  one of the best ways to find like minded people is to search on a topic of your interest. For example if you are interested in fashion, go to Twitter’s search page and search  for the hashtag fashion (#fashion). The users who tweeted most often with that hashtag may share a common interest with you and those are the people you can follow.

Follow lists .. that’s the best way to get value out of Twitter without having to break your head on creating your own groups. Lists help filtering out the noise on Twitter and show you what you are interested in. Use Listorious to find lists of your interest. You can search for your topic of interest and you will find several lists of users, created by other users that you can follow.

3.What conversations do I participate in?: The real value of Twitter is the real time conversation with real people from different parts of the world. My interest in Twitter was reignited during the 2009 elections when I was following Twitter’s elections channel during the presidential debates. Real time opinions and comments on the same topic by people across the globe that refreshed before I could bat my eyelids was an entirely new and exciting experience. To stay in touch with hot topics look at the Trends in Twitter or hashtags that are trending on Twitter. You can also use Twitter’s advanced search options to look for specific topics to talk about. There are several other apps to see what’s being discussed on Twitter like Twitturly which shows the most tweeted links. Very soon you will realize the value of knowing what is being talked about right now by millions of people across the planet. Its real time news, real time discussions, real time thoughts and opinions by real people. In fact the first I heard about the recent earth quake in California or about the Mumbai terrorist attacks was through Twitter. It takes a whole lot of time for breaking news to reach the traditional media. But on Twitter its instant and without intervention.

4. Is there a easy way to tweet from anywhere instead of going to the Twitter website? You don’t need to visit Twitter’s site (which does have availability issues) every time to Tweet or see what’s going on. Get one of the numerous Twitter client apps like:

• Seesmic: Desktop and web client to see tweets in multiple tabs. Like viewing my lists in multiple tabs.
• TweetDeck A desktop client that lets you organize users in groups
• Twhirl: Another desktop client
• Twitterbar: A firefox plug in that lets you tweet from your browser
• Twitlet: Adds a bookmark to your browser that pops up a box for you to tweet
• Twitterific or Echofon (for iPhone)
• Twitterberry (for blackberry)

Future: Someday I want to tweet what I am thinking consciously. There are many times I think of something but forget to write about it or mention it to anyone. And guess what some smart scientist has already figured this one out: Brain-Twitter interface.