Twitter: Broadcast, Engage, or Both?

Twitter seems to work best when used as an amplifier for messages, set to 'broadcast only' if you will. However, to get messages out and move people to action (or at least thought), one must have followers who will re-broadcast and propagate those messages. If not, one is shouting inside an empty room.

This would suggest that if one is not already famous (Peter Gabriel, Salman Rushdie, et al), one will have to build up credible connections (follows and followbacks) with people who have an interest in the ideas and topics about which one will post. This should be done with genuine engagement, however, not merely to accumulate a herd of meaningless, random connections.

However, having meaningful engagement through a froth of posts from those whom one follows is a challenge. I only follow 167 persons/organizations currently, and keeping up with the Twitter feed is like drinking from a fire hose. I cannot fathom what it would be like to have thousands of followers. Letting my imagination free, it makes sense to me that if I were mega-famous (Angelina Jolie), I could only pick an occasional tweet to respond to personally and any other responses would be performed by staff assistants. I served on a thought leader's Twitter chat once and a team of 12 people handled incoming questions with the leader answering only a select handful, some of those with messages I and others craft. This is a common practice for busy, important people who still try to have some level of engagement.

That is the nut of Twitter's paradox: accumulate enough followers to get your messages out, and you cannot effectively engage with your audience, at least not on your own. Limit your followers and follows to a focused group, and your message may not escape the cadre. It is possible that *if* you have the right follows/followers, they will be influential enough to perpetuate your messages.

For now, I have chosen to follow only two kinds of persons:

• People whose ideas/thinking interest me regardless of whether we share belief systems (keeps me intellectually honest and challenges me)
• People who have chosen to follow/support/engage with me despite a lack of common interests (this broadens my knowledge and expands my areas of interest)

I will drink from the firehouse until I figure out how to regulate it.