Twitter – A Personalized “Birds of a Feather” Network
Twitter has a lot of great attributes however the one I love the best in the ability for every single person to build their own personalized “birds of a feather” network. What am I talking about? Well, Twitter has people from all walks of life, all ages, all types of careers, and all types of interests. It is a mini version of the world mixture. What I like about it is that by following people based on your own passions and business interests you basically build your own social network of like-minded people. And chances are if you are focused on this type of approach and your Twitter bio reflects this then you will probably see the majority of these people you follow following you back.
Personally, my interests are centered around marketing, PR, WOM, advertising, enterprise software and community management. Thus if you look at my 5600 followers and the people I follow the mix is mostly made of up people with these same interests.
Want a benefit from that approach? Yesterday I tweeted three separate times asking if my followers were connected to me on Linkedin – and I gave my link there – http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidalston Actually I had never done this type of tweet before. It was a bit of an experiment.
Now for some of you the thought of opening up your Linkedin connectivity so broadly would be a scary thing.
- What if I have nothing in common with those who want to connect?
- I don’t want to turn down any connections and be rude especially after asking this way.
- What if this opens up the floodgates forever and I can’t stop it?
All good points but here’s what happened. Three tweets, each about 1-2 hours apart produced 50 Linkedin requests in total. All of them were relevant to my interests, I didn’t even have to consider turning any down and with each tweet the requests came in for about 10-15 minutes and then stopped. And the more wonderful effect was that I had a chance to speak with many new people in my “birds of a feather” network in a much deeper, richer way.
Have you built your own “birds of a feather” community on Twitter? What other great benefits appear when you do this?
February 10th, 2009 - Posted in social media | | 3 Comments
on February 11th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Hi David,
I use both LinkedIn and Twitter (@katrinamckay) as my two main social marketing platforms, too. I find that the two complement each other very well. I’ve started to add some of my Twitter contacts to my LinkedIn network – because I have more often than not had conversations with my Twitter followers, I liken this to inviting people I have had conversations with in person at networking events and the like.
Thanks for the post!
on February 12th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
David,
I’ve also worked to develop my network using Twitter and LinkedIn and have found these to be excellent sources of great connections.
One observation made today by Nora Young of the CBC Radio show “Spark” is that the people who are on Twitter seem to largely be Marketing and PR people. I think that might be because these are the early adopter communities.
I will continue to learn through developing my community of connections!
Thanks for the post!
on February 12th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Katrina, yes, I do something similar. In fact, if I get an card from an event rather than keeping the card I will invite that person to join on Linkedin. This way regardless of where they work in the future we’ll always be connect.
Paul, cool to hear about the Twitter story on Spark. I saw Nora asking about ideas the other day. Interesting that she mentioned that it was dominated by PR and Marketing people. I’ve certainly found a lot of folks myself though I also think there are many other occupations with big numbers, developers being one. But cool she talked about Twitter on the show.