5 Things I Can’t Stop Talking about on Twitter

Last time I checked, I had 12,000+ tweets on Twitter, where I’m @vdebolt. It took me several years to achieve that number – watching my grandkids tweet, they could do 12,000 a day – but I’m just a few-a-day kinda gal. I was thinking about the various ways I use Twitter in a day or a week. Here are five ways.

1. I Tweet for Work

I’m required by a couple of my jobs (BlogHer Tech Section Editor and Web Standards Sherpa Community Manager) to tweet about whatever new content is ready for outreach and promotion.This is a triple treat most of the time, with a tweet, a Facebook status update, and a Google+ mention.

I consider writing for my blogs to be part of my work day, so I tweet about what I write here when it’s something original. I seldom tweet useful links posts. I have another blog that I keep up on a regular basis as part of my “work day” but I seldom tweet about it. That blog is First 50 Words. It’s a writing practice blog and I don’t tweet the daily prompt because I haven’t found that many people are interested in them.

2. I Tweet to Contact and Converse

Are you aware of the number of bloggers who do not include a contact email anywhere on their blog? It’s epidemic. I often contact people via Twitter to ask them for their email address, especially if I want to feature them in a post on BlogHer.

Casual conversations about weather, TV shows, books, or what some boneheaded politician just said are frequent subjects of my tweets. Or I reply to someone else’s conversational tweet with a remark that I hope will get a conversation going.

In the vein of conversation, I often tweet or retweet strictly local information about my city and state.

I sometimes comment on my personal life: where I’m going, what I’m doing, what I’m cooking or where I’m eating, how I’m feeling. I don’t do much of this because it’s boring, but I think people need to be a little open about them selves, even in a public forum. Not completely open, but open enough to seem real.

3. I Tweet in Support of My Brand

I’m not sure I have a brand, but if I did it would be something like “Web Teacher is that site that shares all sorts of useful stuff about web design and web education.” So I tweet a lot of links to stories written by others that tie in with what I do here. Supporting myself by supporting my community might be another way to state it.

4. I Tweet in Support of My Causes

I tweet and retweet things that support women. Not that I don’t support men – see item 3 – but I love to point out the technical achievements, great writing, great presentations, and other accomplishments of women in general. (That’s probably why I like working for BlogHer so much. I get to do things in support of women every single day.)

Liberal is a term that applies to me, so I tweet things in support of the liberal agenda and of various liberal causes.

5. I Tweet Comments Which I Know Will be Disregarded to Celebrities

I know some celeb with a gazillion followers doesn’t care what I think, but Twitter has opened up a channel that lets everyone comment on everything. So I send Scott Simon tweets about his latest turn of phrase on NPR or tell Eliza Dushku that I mentioned her in a blog post about Swipp. I don’t consider these tweets in the conversation category, because I don’t expect a response. Sometimes I retweet celebrities if they say something I think people will want to know, for example when Dana Delany announces you can finally get China Beach in a boxed set of DVDs, I consider that worth broadcasting with a RT.

These 5 kinds of tweets are a consistent pattern with me. I hope the people who follow me on Twitter find at least one of these five topics of interest to them. Do you have a Twitter pattern? What are your topics?