To Twitter or not to Twitter / Does Twitter HAVE to be so boring?

I joined twitter about 4 years ago. I have a jewellery business, I have a website and also sell on Etsy. Everyone told me that I needed to 'do social media' to succeed. I followed their advice, got me a facebook page and got me a twitter account.
I did as I was told and followed all the people I was told to follow, other sellers on etsy, people whose blogs I followed, other crafty types - I did it all. Any crafty type I went and looked to see who they were following and followed them as well, and slowly my followers grew, got about 700 followers. I tweeted about all the things I could think of that were to do with my craft and as etsy told me to,I always tweeted when I posted something new. Sometimes I was a bit canny and even tweeted when I was just renewing. I would try and start up conversations, try and engage and you know what? I hit a big fat wall of void. I hardly ever heard back from anyone. Yes sometimes I would get a retweet, but by and large it was the most depressingly boring thing I have ever done. People raved about twitter and I could not understand. All I had in my feed were tweets with new Etsy listings or adverts saying 'buy my crap'.



And then a wonderful thing happened. As I do blogging (I actually have about four blogs and write for another one), do facebook and twitter, I also trained as a journalist, I ended up being the person to start up the twitter account for the school I work at. Well of course you then have to start following a brand new breed of tweeter. Other schools, Universities, local newspapers, publishing houses, people of note. Hey presto twitter suddenly got interesting. Yes sure, some of the celebrities are promoting themselves, but not all, in fact what I see in the news feed now is just interesting facts, latest news, stuff that is actually worth reading. It is a totally different ball game. I am suddenly engaged, I love opening twitter up, I devour all the interesting stuff and retweet like an idiot because it is just so interesting. Of course the school I work at also has a lot of interesting things to say as well. So, if you recognise yourself in the top of this post, have a go and look around for some interesting people to follow, you can't go far wrong following your local paper, in fact just enter your local city in the search and see all the interesting accounts that come up. Newspapers and entrepreneurs are good as well. The more discerning and intelligent celebrities are worth having a stab at, although do get ready to unfollow them, some of them are right narcissistic idiots, but some are just lovely creatures. I deleted all the boring people from my own account ages ago, and was following about 20! That has changed now and I have started following all the same ones I follow for my works account. It's a much more pleasant experience. No idea whether it will do anything for my business, but it sure didn't do that much before anyway, so at least I'm enjoying it now.
Anyway, just thought I'd share.
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