Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as I have sent out upwards of 3,000 tweets, but I actually like Twitter. It’s one of the first things I check in the morning. It’s one of my best sources of political and sports news. It’s where I go to find time-wasters and, occasionally, good news stories to report on.
But I’ve been thinking for a few months about how I use Twitter, and it’s a bit selfish. I use it for a lot of things — it’s my RSS reader, my scanner for breaking news and my serendipity-generator — but I don’t think I’m putting enough back into Twitter.
A few months ago, I blogged about the idea of using specific days of the week to tweet about various things, but that idea quickly passed. I wasn’t ready to commit to a Twitter schedule.
I came back to the idea this week, though, about being a bit more targeted in my tweets. What’s the purpose of @danoshinsky? What am I delivering?
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
My Twitter day should be like any good story: it needs a definite beginning and a definite end. So I’ll experiment with this:
-My first tweet of the day will be a bit of morning inspiration. It might be a quote or a YouTube video or a link to an article. But it’ll be a thought for the day.
-My last tweet of the day will be a closing thought. It’ll be an observation, maybe something wise that I’ve learned or heard that day.
The stuff in the middle — interesting links and retweets — will stay pretty much the same. I’ll try to send out 3-6 of those a day. They’ll be interesting things that I’ve read or seen.
As usual: I’ll try to keep the personal stuff to an absolute minimum. I don’t have a smartphone, so you won’t be seeing too many Twitpics out of me. And only a handful of people really want to read my live play-by-play of sporting events. I’ll avoid it, if at all possible.
Your thoughts would be appreciated, either below in the comments or with an @ reply to @danoshinsky.