I used to be obsessed with how Twitter can help you to develop skills to cultivate a community.
Then I became fixated with people to follow on Twitter.
Next I morphed my interest into types of Tweets if you Twitter every day.
Now it is the quality of the conversation I am having with my Twitter community that absorbs me.
What do I mean exactly? I keep on eye on my Twitter profile feed. But I am also transfixed by my Twitter Search Feed. I open it each day, type in “johnwelsh” and see what happens.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not doing it to see if I myself am mentioned. I am doing it to see whether my Twitters are part of a conversation with my community, that is
- are my Tweets being reTweeted?
- are individuals in my Twitter community addressing me publicly but directly with @replies?
- is my Twitter community answering questions that I ask?
Take a look now at my Twitter Search. I hope it is not just my face filling the page, that my own Tweets are interwoven with other people’s Tweets. Of course there’s a risk that it will all be me.
So I set myself a tough task. If my face begins to fill a whole page on the Twitter Search Feed with not another human being in sight, I feel under pressure. How can I shift the nature of my Tweets to ensure I am conversing with my Twitter community and not just broadcasting to it.
What happens when you put your Twitter profile name through Twitter Search? What is the quality of the conversation you are having with your Twitter community?
Photo credit: Phineas H
John Welsh's Blog 
I find myself doing a very similar thing John. It become obsessive – like twitter itself.
The think about responses is how random they are – I often get responses to banal tweets (such as the fact I left my lunchbox at home this morning) rather than big questions or debates that I try to instigate.
As an aside there’s a new tool call Twickie http://twickie.pirillo.com/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fDefault.aspx which tracks your conversations on twitter. Thanks to @paulbradshaw for that.