Twitip

In this post Mark Hayward (follow @mark_hayward) provides a list of ten people that all twitter beginners should be following. If you have other “must follow” recommendations for beginners, please feel free to put them in the comments.

Did you just take the big leap and open your first Twitter account? Is it for work, business, or pleasure?

A few months ago I joined Twitter, primarily as a way to network, but also to help people, and as a way to promote Train for Humanity and my small business.

When you start using Twitter for the first time it can feel a bit overwhelming, almost like entering a really crowded train station during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. There are lots of conversations and commotion going on everywhere, but you are in the station by yourself, an outsider, and certainly not a participant.
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Today I’d like to start a new type of post here at TwiTip – Interviews of Effective users of Twitter. I’m going to kick it off with an interview with Steve Rubel (@steverubel) a great Twitter user, PR expert and blogger at Micro Persuasion.

In this interview I ask Steve about his journey with Twitter, how he uses it, about growing follower numbers, for his suggestions on monetizing Twitter and for his views on the future of Twitter (and more).

Note: I asked my followers on Twitter to submit their questions for Steve and have acknowledged those followers to inspired some of the questions below. To be included in this type of thing in future follow @problogger and keep your eyes open for future calls for questions.

Steve thanks for joining us on TwiTip – Can you tell us your Twitter story. When did you start? Why? What attracted you to it?

In December 2006 I was invited to meet Bill Gates as part of a special blogger meeting on the Microsoft campus (Microsoft is a client of my employer but I was invited as a blogger). Evan Williams was at the meeting and we shared a cab to Sea-Tac Airport where he told me about Twitter. I was truly skeptical at first but I signed up when I got back to NY. I wasn’t convinced the site was going places. It wasn’t until about February or March of 2007 that I began to use Twitter in earnest and began to really enjoy it.

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