What Are Your Social Networking Rules of Engagement? An Honest Look at One Marketer’s Twitter Stats

Unless you have a ton of time on your hands, you can never be totally sure whom you’re talking to on Twitter now, can you? This is disconcerting given the casual demeanor Twitter users assume as they grow more and more comfortable with microblogging media. I myself am firmly entrenched in the Twitter culture now (Or would that be counter culture?). As such, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the growth of my following and the ease with which I’ll tweet about nearly anything.

Maybe that’s a problem.

Time to step back and take inventory of my Twitter habits. And thanks to a handy little website called TweetStats.com, I am making some very quick yet telling observations.

TweetStats is great because it gives you both a quantitative look at your tweeting rituals and a qualitative look at what you’re really saying (over and over again) to your tweeps throughout the day. I feel pretty good about my numbers. Since I first joined Twitter I’ve been tweeting consistently and with increasing frequency. That’s boded well for my follower numbers. Though I think I could do better at tweeting through the day instead of more heavily in the morning and at night. Turns out working from home with kids underfoot indeed impacts my social presence throughout the “work” day.

Things get a little dicier when I look at my “tweetcloud” which is basically a tag cloud representing words commonly found in a Twitter user’s tweets. Let’s just say I am not all that impressed with the content of my tweets, at least not from an online marketing-slash-social networking perspective. Turns out I have a propensity to talk baby and kids more than marketing, not exactly the best way to attract, er, people interested in marketing.

Tweetcloud also shows your replies, prefixed by an “@” symbol, but I filtered those out (you can do that right in tweetcloud) for the purpose of this blog post. (It felt a little presumptive to include all those Twitter IDs without the consent of their owners.) Nevertheless, the reply data is useful because it indicates how engaged you really are with your Twitter community. You may find after reviewing your tweetcloud, for example, that you’re only “talking” to a very narrow audience. You may also find you’re not quite as captivating or focused as you believed yourself to be.

Tip: If you mouse over any tag in your tweetcloud it will tell you the number of occurrences of that word in your tweet history. Neat.

Seems that social media is beginning to imitate life, that we’re becoming less aware of ourselves, less edited and more extemporaneous. I think, for the most part, this is a good thing, a nice rebound from the dot com culture where anyone can (pretend to) be anything. Perhaps social media like Twitter is bringing some balance and even rawness to an online world overrun with self-proclaimed gurus and actors and artifice.

TweetStats and its accompanying tweetcloud tool took lets you to take an honest look at your online behavior, our -isms, so that you can arguably do a better job of self editing in future tweets. I suggest though that it’s okay NOT to go overboard with this. Instead, strive to strike a balance between marketing your core message and putting some of yourself right into the message itself.

So tell me: what are your own rules for social networking etiquette?