Like most things I try to learn, I dive deep into the Twitter pool and hope I can start swimming. After gulping down a lot of water, I finally made it to the pool side where I can crawl, rest, review, and plan my next dive.

I read very little before starting. I was put off by all the self-proclaimed experts. I’m certainly not an expert either, but others can learn from my many mistakes and the few things I’ve learned so far. If you’re a newbie or have been using Twitter for a while, I recommend reading the help and other documentation available on Twitter.

When I started, I had no idea how to get someone to follow me, but I knew that if I was going to use social media to market something, someone had to pay attention to me. I read somewhere that people would follow you, if you followed them. For the first week or so, I was a sucker follower. I followed everyone I could see. It’s easy to understand why this tactic seems successful to novices. Works! I started to have a lot of followers!

I need to continue experts and respected experts in the area I want to write about. I need good sources from which to select posts and tweets. I understand that most of those sources will not follow me and if they did, I would be a lost voice among their thousands of followers.

I need followers because I want to promote my blog. Hopefully, through blogging and retweeting interesting content for my followers, I will gain credibility as an authority in my field.

Like many people, I am naturally curious about many topics, especially those related to my livelihood. I wasn’t so interested in what they promoted, but how they promoted it. It wasn’t until I hit Twitter’s first follow limit of 2,000 that I realized I needed to be more selective about who I followed. Twitter keeps a tight rein on the formula for exceeding this limit, but many believe it’s a “follower-to-follower” ratio that’s closer to 90%. In other words: you will need 2,000 followers before you can follow 2,200.

I needed to start dropping some of the people I was following who weren’t following me. Twitter didn’t seem to provide any method to identify my unfollowers, but after some research, I found tweepi. Tweepi is an essential part of managing my Twitter account now. The free version allows you to easily remove your “unfollowers”, follow your followers and identify inactive followers. I haven’t used the premium version yet, but I plan to. It has many more tools and features that will help me automate many tasks that I now do manually.

Ultimately, I want to make a living. I want to design websites, support small business networks, and develop a residual income stream from advertising on my blog. I think most of the raids have similar motives. However, there is a kinship that can be formed between people with similar desires. Somewhat unexpectedly, I have started some budding relationships with fellow tweeters. Perhaps for an old cynic like me, there is something “social” about Twitter after all. I hope so. That can be the most satisfying result of tweeting.

I’m still learning, and doing a lot the hard way too! I will write to you again soon to tell you more of my mistakes. In the meantime, I’ll try to learn as much as I can about the effective use of Twitter. Please leave comments and suggestions. I can really use them! Oh yeah, I almost forgot; you can follow me on Twitter @tcledford.