Commenting, replying, asking, sharing, and helping are among five tips you can use to overcome Twitter block, wrote Mark Havenner last year.
Each tip is valuable and chock-full of simple advice, such as this bit on the importance of sharing content in Twitter:
Make it a habit to simply share what you find as you find it. Link retweets are the most popular type of tweet for a reason. Most people are there to find news and websites, and if you post interesting things people will notice you more.
But Mark missed something more valuable than sharing and asking and helping. He missed quitting. A sure-fire way to overcome Twitter block is to stop using the social networking service, to take a break, to quit.
I should know. I quit on January 6. As I write this, it’s been 14 days and I don’t miss writing tweets. Reflecting on my Twitter sabbatical one week in, I wrote about finding value in other ways: engaging with friends and colleagues on Facebook and LinkedIn, enhancing my knowledge on assorted Ning-powered online communities, and actively commenting on other people’s blogs.
Despite not sending messages on Twitter, I’m not avoiding the site. I continue to listen here and there, watching what people are writing, clicking their links, and observing trending topics. I continue to follow new people and organizations, and I am organizing my Twitter lists to make my time on twitter.com more productive and focused to what I want to learn and who I want to learn from.
I’m accustomed to changing how I use Twitter. Over the past year, I’ve reciprocally followed over 7,000 accounts, then unfollowed everyone, and later deleted the account and its rank to start fresh. But those are tactics, I recollect. Determining who you want to follow and whether you should unfollow is a tactic, no different than ascertaining whether someone should be in your incoming stream or in a defined list. Taking a break from Twitter, though, is not a tactic but a strategic decision.
If you have used Twitter for x number of days or months or years and never changed your usage, I challenge you to take a break. Take a day off, take a weekend off, take a month off. Don’t quit cold turkey but stop tweeting and start listening. I guarantee you will feel healthier as a result, and when you decide to return to writing tweets, there will be a purpose.
@gwenbell
Bravo, Ari.
You’re spot on that sometimes the best strategy is to get off altogether. I spent the last two weeks traveling internationally and had twenty minutes of internet during half the trip. It helped tremendously. At the beginning of twentyten I decided to pull back on my number of tweets per day. I imposed an arbitrary limit of max of 5 public tweets per day. It has made the difference. (Side note: I also decided to check email only once a day after reading Leo’s Babauta’s book The Power of Less.)
Sometimes the best solution to what ails us is restraint/elimination.
@wchingya
It’s something that I didn’t expect yet refreshing at the same time.
You obviously have given this quite some thoughts and could be a good advise for some who have started with mass following with no objectives but now decided to take a turn from it.
For me, I’ll take your advise to ‘listen more’. Most of the time when I’m not tweeting, I normally still log in and catch up with what others are saying. Lots of good stuff out there but only if we have a good filter for it. Appreciate the sharing.
@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker
@seanplatt
Right on, Ari! I don’t think I know of anyone who has played around with Twitter as much as you. If you have advice, it would do us all well to listen.
@panaveyard
Interesting concept.
Flies in the face of most opinion, but I can see how certain circumstances could lead to this being a healthy option.
Good luck
Pan
@healthypal
I quit twitter a couple of months ago and recently started again. I was tweeting under Health_Chat. I just needed a break from too much of everything over the holidays. What I realized during my Twitter break is that being involved with like minded people helps a lot- rather than just getting enraged over the news, etc. Being involved and having a voice (or at least the perception of a voice) is a healthy outlet. Now I regret deleting my account and starting over.. This would be no big deal if the ‘account restore’ worked !
@kateblogs
I haven’t stopped using Twitter completely, but I have scaled back how often I tweet and as a result I’m also spending more time catching up with friends on Facebook, keeping up with news stories and commenting on blogs – the latter I’m really pleased about, I’d fallen out of the habit and hadn’t realised how much I’d missed it until I picked it up again. Twitter is great, I do enjoy using it, but it’s no substitute for sharing thoughts and opinions in a longer form.
@jeda21
I think that because we start seeing Tweeting as a job with statistics, metrics, and tactics…then the spontaneity of sharing and interacting is gone. Many of us prefer our personal accts vs. Tweeting for work accounts (company, services). Facebook is much more spontaneous and most of us use it for family and friends vs. work, ergo another reason it’s perhaps viewed a little friendlier/casual/fun.
@david_j_parsons
instead of using twitter as a news service, you can still use it as a contact service. i currently post my favorite blog news posts through feedburner and if i happen to pass by anything interesting, i will go post it to twitter and maybe a couple of other services. Its an easy and convenient way of using twitter. Instead of quiting, how about just getting on every once in a while.
@lardito
It is interesting to me to learn about the practices of those that I think I want to listen and learn from regarding social networking practices. I like the idea of just listening for awhile…..I think it may change my following practices as I think they need some refining.
Thank you
Thanks for your comments, all. I’m slowly easing my way back into tweeting, sparked by Gwen’s comment which was aligned with something I’d been thinking.
A huge problem with the importance of listening on Twitter is when you are following dozens, hundreds, thousands of folks, it is literally impossible to listen to everyone. I’ve chatted with Amber Naslund of Radian6 about this; as @ambercadabra, she is unable to watch what everyone writes. She follows bits here, bits there. I used to following tweeps like that, and you may, too.
But if you’re following even 100 tweeps and everyone tweets 5x daily, that’s 500 tweets a day. Who can see them all?
Perhaps something you might want to consider is to pick out 5 random tweets from anyone you follow. Use the clock; see what Jane tweets at 9am, 2pm, 6pm, etc. If 3 of those 5 tweets are unappealing to you, uninspiring to you, non-engaging to you, unfollow that person and drop him/her in a list if you’d prefer.
Something to think about, for it’s something I’m amid doing myself.
@tsudo
While I completely agree that taking a break from Twitter can add much needed perspective and time to reflect I’m astounded by some of your commentary.
“Don’t Miss Writing Tweets?”
I completely disagree. When I take a break its one of the things I miss most. If you don’t miss the privilege and fun of tweeting and sharing then I’d suggest not worrying about twitter at all.
In the past you followed 7000, then unfollowed everyone, then deleted account?
Honestly, that seems like madness. I’ve never followed simply because someone followed me. My stream was too valuable to be cluttered so I hand approve and prune my follow list very carefully. This prevents every needing to unfollow everyone.
Deleted account?
This shows that your community was all that important in the first place.
Take a break? Yes. But for anyone else I’d advise to ignore the rest of the article.
-my .o2
Heh. You say potato, I say potato. Same word on paper; the difference is how we say it.
Surely you don’t approach people from other countries who speak fluent English but with accents and suggest it is madness they don’t pronounce words with the same dialect as you. So, why is it different here?
…and if if you’ve never eaten the potato the way it looks and tastes to me, how can you be sure your potato is the best-tasting potato?
I quit using Twitter for a week but I celebrated by tweeting all the stuff i did on my sabbatical.
@tsudo
Very true sir. Didn’t mean to be too coarse and Twitter is a matter of preference.
I do still agree taking a break is a good idea (easy said than done) but a good idea.
I just think unfollowing everyone is seldom the right answer and I’d only delete my account if I was done for good.
I’m curious about something: I recently unsubscribed to 200+ blogs I followed by RSS, and began following by a new system. Would you be equally opinionated by that action as on Twitter, or do you take more offense because one can “see” if I am following them on Twitter?
@tsudo
To me its a very different action.
1) It’s the difference from unfollowing a lot of users that add little value and unfollowing everyone carte blanche. I assume you still subscribe to a few blogs that you appreciate so I think that is where the difference lies.
And blogs are content, twitter is people.
Blog posts are content written by people, no different in my eyes to tweets written by people. It is not accidental some call Twitter a 140-character microblog platform.
Library of congress archiving everything won’t help twitters cause. Every bad thing you’ve ever said will be preserved forever. It’s almost worse than having a facebook profile.