Do You Tweet to Read or Do You Tweet to Write?

I’ve observed several celebrity Twitter users to have a friend/follower ratio that is heavily skewed toward the follower side. This means they have a huge following, but follow only a very few people. While most do reply to tweets related to them or directly sent to them as @replies, a lot are probably just using Twitter to post updates about themselves (which is understandable, especially for folks with a very public life). Some others are most likely marketers. They don’t engage in conversation much, but they do post a lot of quotes, retweets and links.

On the other hand, some Twitter users I know are more of readers rather than writers. They seem to have a lot of followed folks, but only a few followers. And they mostly engage in conversation when the topic interests them.

I’m part of the second group. I must admit I’m not too fond of tweeting out of the blue, about what I ate for breakfast, musing about the weather, or complaining about the chores I’m currently doing. I mostly scan and read updates from my Twitter friends–mostly on my mobile phone using Gravity–and reply to or retweet interesting messages. I also try to get ideas for blog posts or articles from my friends’ feed or from searches relevant to my interests. For me, Twitter is not a platform for simply shouting out my ideas, but rather a community with a rich cloud of information ready to be harvested and processed.

What about you? Do you tweet to read? Or do tweet to write?

6 thoughts on “Do You Tweet to Read or Do You Tweet to Write?

  1. Great pictures they really portray true passion and sexy appeal. Love is truly wonderful when captured with such beautiful feminine exposure.

  2. I use twitter as a marketing and traffic generation tool; thus I keep extra precaution not to tweet something that is boring and self promoting (write) or un-follow someone quickly if they are too “spammy”.

  3. I like Twitter for both reading and writing. I love having being able to share something funny I’ve found or ask for help with something. And, I enjoy getting to know online acquaintances better. That’s primarily why the list of those I follow is so much smaller than those who are following me- I don’t want to be flooded with Tweets from people I am unfamiliar with.

  4. But I do like to retweet past blog postings, in case they get someone’s interest and they visit my blog. My posts get tweeted on auto-pilot. When I’m online I follow what’s going on, but I usually only tweet in response to something some else says.

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