5,000 Tweets … So What's the Point?

I tweet. Do you?

I started using Twitter as my personal social media experiment in January 2009.

My first tweet read: I'm trying to figure out how to get three girls well again.

I quickly decided to use Twitter for professional and not personal updates, saving my family news for Facebook friends.

Fast forward 4,998 tweets to earlier this week. I realized that I was close to sending my 5000th tweet.  That got me thinking, “What have I learned from Twitter? Why do I tweet? Why should others tweet?”

A look at the numbers

At 140 characters or less per tweet, I’ve pounded about 700,000 characters on my iPad, Blackberry and wireless keyboard.  I strive to make each letter, symbol and punctuation mark count.  

My Twitter strategy is simple: I want to be engaging, helpful, entertaining and informative. Who doesn’t?

What I tweet and retweet

  • Job leads. I’ve shared hundreds of job leads for PR and marketing gigs.
  • Instant feedback. I’ve tweeted rants and raves for hotels, airlines, retailers and consumer product manufacturers. I find companies that “get Twitter” often respond faster by tweet than phone or email support.
  • My company’s news. I’ve given updates about Rhudy & Co., my fourth child, and links to our company blog about PR, marketing and communication topics. I’ve connected with many journalists. As a result of Twitter, USA Today quoted me in a December 2011 article on company holiday cards.
  • Celebrity connections. My favorite tweet ever came from The Beaver, AKA, Jerry Mathers. Here’s what the former childhood star tweeted to me:
  • Contests. I’ve won stuff thanks to Twitter, including registration for a social media conference registration last year. The registration was valued at $1,800. I’ve also won a few gift cards from random places.
  • Passing it on. I’ve retweeted links to countless articles, blogs and digital content. I like to share community news and ways to give back through Virginia nonprofits.
  • Pictures. I’ve posted tweet pics (or pictures via Twitter) of random hot rods, funny signs and stunning architecture. 

I plan to keep tweeting.

Jonathan Rhudy thinks Twitter is like old-school headline writing. You need powerful verbs and descriptive adjectives.
https://www.rhudy.biz/blog/2013/5/23/5000-tweets-so-whats-the-point.html
www.rhudy.biz
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-47
66555
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:WZYYYG6TZ4CDPGLVDV7LNSPFKDI2A26C
<urn:uuid:842eacc3-9f7f-40b4-ba58-5f23911e3a01>
2018-11-18T07:57:37Z
198.185.159.144
text/html
sha1:L3JN3IOGEDWXRFJDDXJNHWORKZTB5QOM
<urn:uuid:eebd8533-3dac-4a50-aeff-ecc3d16c1438>
https://www.rhudy.biz/blog/2013/5/23/5000-tweets-so-whats-the-point.html
response
<urn:uuid:ab256bb3-5fc7-480a-bdab-7a11a19dee19>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-47
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-138-120-224.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/