If you are like me, you love Twitter. Since I work from home most days, having my TweetDeck open all day is as natural to me as having my email open.
Since I have sent over 15,000 tweets, I would say I qualify as a Twitterholic. Even though I’ve met some of my very best friends on Twitter, every now and then I suffer from Twitter burn out.
Has that ever happened to you? It’s ok, you can admit it.
After all, between keeping up with the conversations, answering all your updates, checking out all your new followers and commenting on all the blogs your Twitter friends write, it’s easy to understand that anyone could feel burned out!
Since I don’t like to abandon Twitter and all my friends when those feelings of burn-out strike, I decided to come up with some ways that I can still be active on Twitter without getting burned out. These things have worked really well for me, and I hope you will try them and they work well for you too!
1. Filter Your Tweets – In my opinion, it is imperative to have a Twitter app like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop or Hootsuite to filter your tweets. Make a VIP column for yourself and put your favorite Twitter friends in that column so you don’t miss their tweets in the stream. This will save you time and frustration and will definitely keep the burn out feeling at bay for a while!
2. Don’t Make Twitter a Contest – Twitter is not a contest. There are so many sites that try to rate you on some ridiculous scale and so many people that will make you feel like you aren’t important if you don’t have a lot of followers. Don’t buy into any of that nonsense because the moment you do, Twitter becomes stressful and you’ll invite the burn out feeling! Twitter is a fun way to build relationships, spread joy and share important information. It is not a popularity contest.
3. Build Relationships with the Right People – Ohhh.. this is so important. It is better on Twitter to have a dozen rock solid relationships instead of trying to be friends with everyone. Here is a secret that all power tweeters know: If you have a handful of strong content providers that you’ve built relationships with, you will never be at a loss for great content to tweet. At any moment I can open my TweetDeck and see a ton of high quality information that I can retweet out to my followers. No stress, no searching, it is just there, always. That is what you want.
4. Don’t Feel Obligated – So many times I see people tweet things like, “I’m so sorry I was away for a while, but I’m back now,” and I feel bad for that person because I know they are feeling obligated. The moment Twitter becomes an obligation, the moment it isn’t fun anymore. The moment it isn’t fun anymore, the moment you’ll feel burned out. Sometimes you just have to walk away. Sometimes you forget to thank someone for a retweet and sometimes you get busy and forget to respond to a tweet. It happens. It’s okay. Twitter has to be one of your happy places, and that means, don’t feel obligated.
5. Manage Your Time – Managing your time basically means you have to realize that you don’t have time to read everything in your stream on Twitter. Become a master scanner. Once you are filtering your tweets, this becomes very easy!
6. Be Genuine – I saved the best for last. If you want to keep the burn out feeling at bay, be genuine on Twitter. Be genuinely interested in getting to know your followers. Be genuinely interested in how Twitter works. Get a conversation going! When was the last time you got burned out doing something you were genuinely interested in?
I love my Twitter very much, but I also love my son and my life outside my computer. I think as with everything in life, balance is the key. If you follow the steps above, I believe you’ll be able to achieve more of a balance and be able to be active on Twitter without getting burned out!
My friend and fellow Bit Rebels writer, @arnteriksen, put this video in one of his articles and I loved it so much that I wanted to share it with you here. Please share you own ideas on how to be active on Twitter without getting burned out in a comment below!
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