If I’m 100% honest, I have to admit that not a single one of my “real” friends is on Twitter, at least not that I know of. Quite frankly, we all keep our personal lives and our Internet lives pretty much separate. Occasionally, I’ll stumble upon someone I know in an online capacity, but for the most part, since we all live and exist in the same offline world, we just interact there.
Secondly, I have long felt that Twitter wasn’t much of a way to build traffic for sites, and that even if it were, that traffic wouldn’t necessarily be the kind of traffic that would stick around for long enough to become anything other than a blip on my Google Analytics graph.
Nonetheless, I have clients, online friends, contacts, and so on who either swear by Twitter, require Twitter, or just plain accept Twitter as one of those things everyone is doing right now, whether or not it will ever amount to anything.
So, I post regular Tweets which are both personal and professional, and I have a small amount of followers, but enough that no one hassles me about not being down with “social media.”
But, today I accidentally discovered something. Last night while setting up some Twuffer Twitters for the day, I noticed someone with a Starbucks logo as their Twitter profile picture. Naturally, I clicked on it. Turns out, it is THE Starbucks. I decided to follow them.
This morning I awoke to an email. Turns out, Starbucks is FOLLOWING ME!
Actually, this is apparently considered a “best practice” for corporations on Twitter. Now that I know that, I can have another 50 or 100 friends in no time. All I have to do is follow the companies that Twitter.
My real friends will be so jealous…not.