@kissmygumbo in case you want to follow me!

I’ve been on Twitter for quite some time now and hit the 1500 follower mark yesterday (I is soooo special). Why do I use Twitter (d’uh I’m a web geek and have to try everything new)? Well…the first thing that appealed to me was the New Orleans community. I could ask about a restaurant and in a matter of 20 seconds, have 10 opinions about whether to wear jeans or a skirt to it. I could be in the French Quarter and find out that someone else was there and meet up with them for coffee. It really was a handy social tool for me and helped me get to know people in the area better. Most of the first local Twitterers were also bloggers (no surprise there). At this point I kept my politics off Twitter and swore to only use it for social stuff because many of the locals have opposing views with me. We have even had 2 NOLA Tweetups that I attended (there have been more), where we all got together. So what happened next? How did I get further sucked into this time-wasting vacuum? The Tweetdeck application on my laptop and Twitterfon application from my iPhone starting making this Twitter thing very handy (curse them both now).

So there is this wonderful NOLA community, easy applications and then my Twitter world got carried away from there. If you tweet a bunch and give decent tweets (not just being a self-promoting whore) people start to follow you. Some followers are businesses I could care less about and some are interesting people and hey…this is fun. Next cames the whole Top Conservatives on Twitter craze…shoot…now mixing politics on Twitter…did not want to go there at all. I barely made it through Twitter during the elections and actually stayed away from it a bit then. I’m weak and gave into temptation and before I knew it, I’m sucked into the world of politics on Twitter – UGH!!! Getting deeper and deeper…. By now you all know about my involvement with Soldiers’ Angels. We have 1,000 soldiers waiting for adoption – tweet it – and bam…people Retweet (repeat my tweet to their followers) and the word gets out to their followers (thousands of people get my message in a few seconds). Shoot – this thing works pretty darn good. Going on air live in 2 minutes, Tweet about it and take live tweets during the show – OMG this works too!

Lat week I threw out my idea to my friend JP from Milblogging.com (who was a little late to the Twitter party, but in a matter of 3 weeks has 15,000 followers) that I want to draw attention to the military on Twitter (each armed force even has a Twitter account). #Milmonday was born yesterday and I would say it was a success (and the military crowd goes wild). Now, 15,000 would be a nice amount of followers to pimp a blog post or my radio show, but I really like my followers and like to converse with them. When you get to numbers in the 1,000 – what is the chance that person will know who the heck you are? This rule does not apply to celebrities who have a gazillion followers and for the most part don’t give a rat’s ass who is following them. We are there to here their profound Tweets (snark inserted here). Anyhoo…Twitter is cool and I get to meet lots of people and hey kids “everyone is doing it!”

” Here is my Twitter 101 post for those considering on wasting hours of your life.

h/t

h/t for video Kerri