Getting Traction with twitter..
I have encouraged quite a few friends to join twitter, but many of them have trouble getting going.. If you don't have a community of people to interact with, it is kinda lame. If you do have a community of people to interact with, it is revolutionary.
So, here is the trick to getting going...
Go to search.twitter.com
Enter something that you are interested in. This is easy for me... I like preachers.. I enter something like Francis Chan, Mark Driscoll or Matt Chandler. If you have different interests, it may be harder.
Once you hit enter, you see everybody who is talking about what you are interested it. There are some folks that may be worth following. Click through to their profile and see if any of their other tweets interest you.. If so, follow them. Don't stop there... Try to dialog with them. I rarely follow people who follow me.. 300 or so is more than I care to keep track of. I almost always follow people that dialog with me. So find a recent tweet that you find interesting and send the an @reply about it.. Many will follow you back..
As you go, remember that Twitter works best when there is some dialog. Go out of your way to interact with the people you are following. Retweet stuff you think your followers might like. It isn't a microblog, it is a party. You can build real relationships with real people, and ask them questions like they are in the next cubical.
Hope that helps.
