The workings of this strange social media called Twitter is still quite mysterious. Most folks I know are not on Twitter and those I ask to join me are all “NO WAY.” They are already overcome with managing their Facebook and Myspace Accounts. A lot of people don’t see the point and it can seem quite narcissistic and even annoying to be on Twitter or being bombarded by other people’s tweets. So I recently took the plunge because I was curious about how it could be used for business purposes, show businesses purposes to be exact. I’m following all of my friends that are on there, plus a bunch of celebrities and comedians that I really like. It kind of gives you an insight to their personalities, which can be very interesting to say the least if you follow someone like Courtney Love http://twitter.com/courtneylover79. Tina Fey’s http://twitter.com/TinaFey is pretty funny of course, David Lynch http://twitter.com/DAVID_LYNCH is very factual I’d say. What I’m really intrigued about is how it can be used as a Marketing tool for someone facing an uphill climb. I’m really interested in how I can use it to my advantage as an actor. Let’s say I start following Casting Directors, Agents, Directors, Producers, etc. (99% of which are not on Twitter at the moment). Ok, when and if they get on Twitter, how do you get them to follow you? On Facebook, for example, when someone accepts you as a friend, you are automatically following each other – status updates showing up, etc. Twitter is far more one sided. A celebrity like Ashton Kutcher http://twitter.com/aplusk follows only about 79 people, but has over 1,000,000 followers right now, thanks to winning his challenge against CNN recently http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090417/ap_en_ce/twitter_million_mark. So the obstacle is if you follow them, it certainly doesn’t mean they are going to follow you – the only chance is a) either hope they check out my profile because they happened to be bored at the moment or b) really do follow them and engage with an intelligent and relevant relationship building conversation. Does seem like an odd place to start a business relationship, but we do live in odd times, don’t we? Can this be used as a networking tool at all? Since it’s so one sided, requiring prior popularity to acquire followers, it does seem I’d need to book something substantial first, so people would want to look me up on Twitter and follow me. I do not know whether it will be a complete waste of time, but it sure does make passing the time a little bit more amusing. Well, I’m going to keep playing with it and tweeting like a little bird, hoping I’m not getting sucked in to a big group of twits and a quickly passing fad.
