I am, at heart, a long form blogger. Still – the cool kids, as they say – these days are all on twitter (and, yes, I know by saying it that way, I'm dating myself even further; so be it; it amuses me).

I find myself, here in 2022, wanting to get a better handle on Twitter. This will be a regularly updated blog post summarizing what I've learned.

Rule 0: You Are Screaming Into the Void

Rule 1: Hash Tags

Rule 2: Check Your Mentions

Rule 3: @ sign Someone if It is Relevant

Rule 4: Keep At It

Rule 5: Decide On Your One Metric

Twitter has a number of metrics:

• Followers
• Retweets
• Likes
• Mentions

Trying to pay attention to all of these at once is, for someone who isn't metric oriented and isn't a marketer, a kind of sucky experience. My choice was that I was going to use my Followers count as the metric. When I started this experiment, I had 207 followers. Now I have 208 followers. Progress???

Rule 6: Experiment and Learn from It

Rule 7: Don't Just Tweet Your Own Stuff

Imagine Twitter as if it was a party. If you are only posting your own stuff, it is analogous to that dude bro at a party who only talks about himself. Figure out the intersection between your own content (for me that's ruby / rails / cloud) and stuff that other people talk about. And then when you find something that's in that intersection, that is what you should tweet / retweet / like.