I listen to your podcast because the information you provide is always interesting and useful, and usually also something I’ve not heard before–but also because of your funny and charming personality. The latter leaves me feeling positive and able to implement said good ideas.

I follow you on Twitter for pretty much the same reasons, so the posts I like best are the ones that lead me towards some useful information I didn’t know before and/or the ones that are funny and charming. That includes a little self-marketing, such as alerting us when you’ve posted something new, or even when you need opinions on something.

The tweets that aren’t quite as riveting, for me, are the ones where you’re sharing your irritation with some facet of society or corporations. Often I even share the feeling–but I prefer your podcast persona where you approach those topics with more humor and less overt judgment. It helps me to do the same. But that’s just a personal preference.

You pose a great question. It’s hard to know if your followers really want more of the same, such as product, advice, tips, etc. or if they want to get to know the person behind them.

I tend to get bore with, “I played WW til 4 AM last night.” Who really gives a s*** about that. Some people do, I don’t so I tend to not follow people when that’s all they have to offer. Even the time I waste is too valuable for that!

But you are a witty guy. Everyone here has covered how I feel too. I enjoy reading your tweets because you’re interesting. There’s a lot of thought behind your tweets. It’s not always what you say but how you say it that makes it interesting.

I resonate with your over-analytical mental processing peppered with bitterly ironic humor. So, I say, thumbs up on how you use Twitter.

Cheers,
Scott

I’m glad you’re spending less time on twitter and more time on your book so you can hurry up and finish it. (Hurry up and finish it!)

When a twitter stream becomes a commercial I unfollow. When a twitter stream becomes “Look what HE said” just all RT’s I unfollow. If I wanted to know what those ppl say, especially the A-listers, I’d follow them. The occasional RT is fine, but if it’s constant it’s no longer added value.

I have a blog and tweet when I have a post, but I tweet once. I don’t hammer ppl with it. If there’s an update to a program I am a super fan of I may tweet once, but not every 2 hours in case someone missed it.

So far I think you’re doing fine and striking a good balance between all the stuff above. Building the community by being an interesting person – person being the key part of it, is so much more important than reading like a free advertising stream. People see through that sort of thing and I think they get tired of it. On the other hand, Random tweets “Ate a french fry and it was black on the end” leave me wondering why I’m reading them. I’ve done that sort of thing once in a while, but they tend to be inside jokes that my RL friends will get the reference, and not just blathering.

Asking for feedback like you do for blog/podcast food is an engaging way to get information from your readers and appears to work. I came here from twitter. If I had to guess I’d say if it starts to feel like an advertising campaign it has felt that way for a while to your followers.

I’d like a twitter metric that showed not just followers, but active followers. Some adopters drop off right away, but they still show as live on my list. It’d be interesting if I had some way of knowing who hadn’t used twitter in the past 2 weeks. Knowing how many real followers there are/were would be interesting I think. Not that I obsess about it. I don’t. Just curious about how sticky my followers are.