Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:47 pm

As a fairly active Twitter user (@forestsoftware) I was interested to see the tweet below from @Gotham3, in fact it made me think enough that I retweeted it to my followers.

The reason I found this so interesting was that I see a lot of people who only use Twitter to broadcast about their services to the world with no thought of the people on the other end. If you use Twitter I am sure you know the kind of user that I mean – all you see is “We sell xxx” or “Looking for xxx, use us.”  This kind of tweeter has either forgotten or never understood the idea of social media (the clue is in the name – it’s a case of being “social”).  After a while all you give up reading their tweets and either unfollow the account or even block the account entirely.

On the other hand you also get people who tell you when they are having a coffee, going for lunch, watching a program on TV or even going to the pub.  This kind of person is taking the idea of being social to the extreme and has also forgotten that if you were in a room of people the last thing you want to do is bore them with the details of your life.

To me, the best, and most interesting, people on Twitter are those that remember that Twitter is about being social.  If you treat your time on Twitter as being like a party you would do both – for example  you would introduce yourself to people and also chat to them.  In fact, the best people on Twitter also pass on other information about other things that they have seen (retweet), for example I’ve seen some very useful information such as details of HMRC web-seminars.  Another very effective use of a good Twitter account is to talk to your customers or send them information (for example I’ve seen web hosting companies telling their customers about problems with servers and other firms such as BT answering customer problems – although if you are going to do this you need to remember not to divulge personal information on a public forum where anyone can see it).

So, do you just broadcast on Twitter, do you chat, or do you cover the best of both worlds – advertise your business and engage with people?