Justin, I couldn't help noticing you're following 4,873 people.
That's... a lot of people. I can't keep up with more than 400 follows, much less four thousand (I follow about 100 these days). My kneejerk reaction here is that you've leveraged Twitter effectively but that it's pretty one-sided. That is – you're getting plenty out of the deal, but since you can't really keep up with the people you follow, your Twitter presence ends up 99% self-promotional.
Which is okay, if your goals are strictly promotional.
It's worth pointing out, though, that you can derive a lot of value from Twitter by following only those people who say things that are interesting to you. That's the route I choose. As a result, my steam is filled with chatter about subjects I enjoy, people I like, articles that will interest me. I have conversations with people whose tweets catch my attention. I can count on it to serve as useful data pipe, which in the end, I value more than self-promotion. Of course, YMMV.
Hybrid approach for Twitter outsiders: Do Justin's thing for awhile, then after you hit your follower goal, start unfollowing every single person whose contributions don't improve your stream. If they're interesting but not useful on a regular basis, add them to lists. Keep culling your follows until you get under 200, then enjoy your new, always-on chatroom filled with cool people who say useful things.
However I wouldn't say I get 99% and my followers get 1%. I think they get a much better deal than that.
I've made a commitment to find the best content on a daily basis for 365 days a year. Out of 8400 tweets I've posted I would lay bets no more than 100 have been self promotional.
Also, when people ask me questions directly I try to answer them (i.e. when they put @justinvincent)
So although it is impossible to follow the entire tweetstream I do feel like I connect with the folks who connect with me.
I also use the Pluggio streams feature to watch the select few that I find "especially" interesting! ;)
Of course YMMV and it's different for everyone. I've just tried to show how it's worked well for me :)
So, you are just re-linking from news site which in turn have links to the actual content so you are leveraging TechCrunch/HackerNews to do a lot of pre-sorting for you - assuming you link to the actual site of course and not HackerNews or TechCrunch - because that would give away your source and make your twittering a bit more useless.
This is my number one reason to avoid twitter: it is just all re-tweets of re-tweets of news sites and almost never any unique, REAL content. It's all just a huge noise floor.
If I want interesting articles without having to wait for someone to twitter it, I'll just follow one of the countless news sites out there - no need to wait for your tweeting and it will benefit the site and community of that site - not just a single person trying to promote themselves by trying to show how they follow the latest news.
My Twitter feed has almost none of this "RT's of news sites" stuff going on. I will let you in on my secret: I unfollow people who do that. I unfollow maybe one person every other month now.
Twitter isn't "all just a huge noise floor". It's pretty much whatever you make of it. I agree, this person has made of it a pretty crappy ad-hoc news aggregator.
Between "RTs of news sites", "I am having a bagel" and absolutely shameless self promoting plugs I just came to the misanthropic conclusion of twitter = noise.
I know such generalizations are unfair and a bit closed minded... I can't help it, I am just a bit stuck in the pre "web 2.0" 90s/2000 internet and can sometimes only shake my head at some of those hypes and what's going on these days.
But I digress and you are right, I should give it another try and see what I could actually get out of it.
That's... a lot of people. I can't keep up with more than 400 follows, much less four thousand (I follow about 100 these days). My kneejerk reaction here is that you've leveraged Twitter effectively but that it's pretty one-sided. That is – you're getting plenty out of the deal, but since you can't really keep up with the people you follow, your Twitter presence ends up 99% self-promotional.
Which is okay, if your goals are strictly promotional.
It's worth pointing out, though, that you can derive a lot of value from Twitter by following only those people who say things that are interesting to you. That's the route I choose. As a result, my steam is filled with chatter about subjects I enjoy, people I like, articles that will interest me. I have conversations with people whose tweets catch my attention. I can count on it to serve as useful data pipe, which in the end, I value more than self-promotion. Of course, YMMV.
Hybrid approach for Twitter outsiders: Do Justin's thing for awhile, then after you hit your follower goal, start unfollowing every single person whose contributions don't improve your stream. If they're interesting but not useful on a regular basis, add them to lists. Keep culling your follows until you get under 200, then enjoy your new, always-on chatroom filled with cool people who say useful things.