Twitter is what you want it to be

I love when the “experts” get on their high-horse and talk about the “right” way to use a tool like Twitter. The latest example came from Louis Gray this week.

In a post titled,Twitter is for Following Topics and Listening, Not for Following People.
Louis takes it upon himself to proclaim, just in the title, that he knows how Twitter should be used by all.

He then goes on to use the word “I” somewhere in the neighborhood of 27 times in 7 short paragraphs. So, despite the title, the content of his post is really “I use Twitter to follow topics and listen, not to follow people”, which is fine if that is how he wants to use Twitter.

I don’t happen to think that’s how everyone should use Twitter. Certainly, I follow enough people that we all know I don’t read every tweet, but I follow the people I follow for a reason, and I love interacting with them and creating new connections in my industry, or who are local to me. My wife currently follows 40 people, I think. She is absolutely using it to follow select people, and is enjoying doing just that. Does that make her a poor Twitter user, or someone who is using the tool to do what she wants to do with it?

Twitter, like every other social network out there is a tool, nothing more nothing less. If the tool works for you, use it, if it works for you differently than it does for me, great, use it that way. If it doesn’t work for what you want to do, don’t use it.

Why can’t we just leave it at that?

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