Friday, July 30, 2010

How Empire Avenue Improved my Twitter Experience

While writing about Empire Ave and twitter yesterday, I ended up on a huge tangent about what EAv has done for my twitter experience. I have decided it should be its own blog post. 


My cousin (PGNOMEmade me join twitter YEARS ago, it was new and all cool, and well he is way geekier than I am. I just follow along and then kick his ass at facebook games. I looked at twitter, thought "this is STUPID" and didn't sign back in until Facebook took notifications away from Facebook games and they decided to move their notifications here. I had been piddling around with twitter for a week or two, following the odd celebrity and still not really getting it. Then I joined Empire Avenue.

What happened was my twitter follows grew. The people I was chatting with on Empire Avenue, started conversing with me on twitter. They introduced to me to other people and businesses I should be following that gave great content to my twitter stream. 

Now I could see the value in twitter. A light bulb went off and I understand twitter now, it is more of a great big pipeline of information you tap into, chat around, it is amazing. But you need that content to make it so. 

With Empire Avenue, I didn't feel stalkerish following people anymore. It wasn't scary to follow someone. It was a normal transition to go from saying hi, to following and tapping into the information they were sending. 
I could find local people to follow easily, I can see what they tweet and blog about on their Empire Ave profiles. I have a better understanding of who they are before I follow. 

Along the way, following those people, you find other people to follow with similar interests. People get retweeted into your stream, and you can go see what they are about. 

Now you aren't out there sending random tweets just to tweet. You are retweeting what you find interesting, talking to people, tapping in. 

I love my follow list. I am defensive of my stream. I love the information I get from it, and the people I talk to. I think this is why I get so upset when it gets all spammed up when people try to game it for points. 

Getting my face out there on Empire Ave made my twitter content a million times better. Now I don't even really care what my favourite celebrities are saying. I am actually caring about what is going on in my real life community. Kinda (hehe)


Edited to add, if you are new to twitter and Empire Ave you should add these to follow first:
@empireave
@bgrier 
@EvolveTom
@dups
@aaronkwhite


1 comment:

  1. Agree whole-heartedly. Before Empire Avenue: 4 tweets over the course of a year, and I followed maybe 10 people. Now: 4 tweets a day (okay, okay maybe more than 4) and I now I stalk.. er.. I mean follow and enjoy conversing with over 70 folks. From all over the world.

    Also used to think twitter was just a bunch of people saying "I'm hungry." or "I'm eating donuts!!!" Oh, wait... Where did that "unfollow" button disappear to? ;)

    You forgot to mention that people should add also add @fraygulrock to their follow right off the bat too.

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