Solving the Puzzle of Twitter

This past Labor Day weekend my family went down to the Outer Banks with my in-laws for one last summer hurrah. Almost as soon as we had unpacked my mother-in-law pulled out this complicated puzzle of 750 tiny pieces of all different shapes and colors that she planned on having us all work on. I immediately rolled my eyes and thought, how ridiculous! She wants my five, seven, and nine year old to complete this difficult puzzle? Every piece looks the same and it is just a jumble of pieces with no sense. We all went out to play in the waves and she sat diligently creating the framework for us to work from. She took out every straight edge to define the boundaries first. Then she strategically began grouping the pieces into colors. 

That evening we all gathered around as we began to see a slight chance that there was more to the jumble than first meets the eye. Eventually I ended up spending hours each evening finding the connections between the pieces and getting excited as the picture began to come into view.

As I thought about my reaction to puzzle, I realized it was very similar to most people’s reaction to Twitter. It just looks like a jumbled mess of brief, meaningless conversations.  Like the puzzle, there is a strategy and plan to Twitter that can make the value of it come into view. 

First, a framework must be created.
Determine who will use it and what the voice and messages will be. 
Identify whom you would like to connect with. 
Select a platform such as Hootsuite, Tweetie, or Tweetdeck to use.

Second, group the people you follow into categories using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite so you can follow specific topics and categories of people, (e.g., media, clients, partners, competitors, local community).

Third, begin slowly and patiently to utilize these tools by participating. Post comments, retweet comments that you like, share information and links, engage with your followers.

If you can do these things with the patience required of building a jigsaw puzzle, you will be able to create order from the confusion and begin to reap the rewards. You will see how the people are related and fit together and find new connections you never realized existed.

For the record, I am now an avid jigsaw puzzler because just like Twitter, it fascinates me to be able to create order and design from chaos.