Jon Upchurch

Well, I caught the bug, and how!  It’s very easy to underestimate Twitter, and pass it off as just some new social networking toy, but it really is much more powerful than that.  It’s almost hard to keep up with everything, especially at first and even more so as you follow a sizeable number of people.  I’ve really been trying to balance the accumulation of followers and follows against what I can truly connect with.  I think like anything else, it’s a matter of probabilities.  I really enjoy talking with some of the people I’ve had a chance to connect with so far on Twitter, but so far the trend seems to be that maybe 5% of the people I follow are going to be people I can connect with.  You really need to follow other people to get followers yourself, and I think that some people devalue larger numbers of follows.  There’s been a lot of discussion about following lately, especially with Twitter changing follow policies.

My take is that bots are going to be there no matter what.  If you want to be followed and you’re not a celeb, you need to follow other people, and if you want to actually make connections with people and truly network for mutual benefit, you really need to follow a LOT of people to beat the 5-10% (generous estimate) odds of people you can connect to.

I’m seeing how Twitter can be sued to help me grow my business, and I’ve interacted more with people lately than i have in a while.  I’ve been stuck in my own little rut of school and work projects that Twitter has really made me a part of the world again instead of an island!

Anyhow, I’ll update again on the topic later.  Here’s a quick shout out to some of the people I’ve been chatting with lately!

@actionchick @understandniche @morethancelebs @kwgcw @matthewmarques @metaglyph

You can find me under @jonupchurch ( http://twitter.com/jonupchurch/ )or my business persona @1upwebdev( http://twitter.com/1upwebdev/ ).

- Jon