In the beginning, the old-school media man is stuck to his ways. But over time, he evolves. When I first started blogging, I blogged about anything of interest to me — sports, books, gadgets, the weather, whatever. Eventually, I realized that was no way to build an online audience. I am not a personality of sufficient interest to become some kind of mini-celebrity and my life pales in comparison to a Spalding Gray or a David Sedaris (not to mention comparing my powers of observation to theirs). So I recast myself as a tech and gadget blogger, grabbed this gravitationalpull.net domain as a home, and mainly stick to the plan.
On Twitter, I’ve had the same reluctance. I tweet about tech and gadget stuff, pop culture, investing and the stock market (aka the topics of my work life) and anything else as @ampressman. Sound familiar? So now it’s time to get a little more serious and focused about my tweeting in an effort to help attract more of an audience (and the right audience) for this blog.
However, the solution for Twitter is a little more appealing. Starting and maintaining multiple Twitter accounts is a far lesser burden that running multiple blogs. There are even programs like TweetDeck that make it pretty simple to monitor multiple lists of other Twitterers and send out posts under multiple identities.
Over the weekend, after much frustration with Twitter’s 15 character limit and all the great names already registered (curse you @gravitational!), I settled on the less-than-obvious @gravpulldotnet. My hope is that people will follow it by clicking it on the web or in their Twitter client and won’t have to ever remember to spell it precisely to follow along.
My initial strategy is to tweet about the sames kinds of things I write about here, technology and gadget trends and reviews with a heavy dose of Macs and ebooks. My old stream gets everything else, especially the work-related stuff. Check it out and please do follow. As it stands right now, old @ampressman has 726 followers and brand new @gravpulldotnet has just 10. Let’s even it out!
N.B. This post owes much to the Twitter-related ruminations and suggestions of Internet smarty Rex Hammock. His blog is here and a collection of his posts about Twitter, which I highly recommend, are here. His twitter feed, under the enviable sobriquet of simply @r, is here.
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