Twitter, sometimes awesome; usually not so much, for me at least.

I do like Twitter for the fact that it’s this cool virtual networking event that you can show up to in your underwear and chat with people you might not ever meet in real life. I just find it über difficult to predict which of our tweets will pick up momentum and garner 3,500 clicks and which ones will fly under the radar and only generate three clicks [even if it’s hilarious].

Part of me thinks that our following isn’t being compelled/engaged sufficiently either because I’m not sharing the right content or because I’m just not very interesting, but a little research quells my insecurity from the latter. Sort of.

Guy Kawasaki has 1,360,205 followers on Twitter, and he rarely gets more than a few retweets per update.  The same is true for Brian Clark (aka Copybloger) who has about a tenth of the following and actually posts interesting, original material on copywriting and marketing.

Mindy Kaling, who you might know as Kelly Kapoor from The Office, posted that she woke up with “crunchy hair” this morning and received 123 retweets and 220 favorites.

I’m not sure what that means, but it’s kind of discouraging.

Feeling a little dejected, I sought out counsel on how to step up my Twitter game. And rest assured, there’s no shortage of articles that’ll tell you how to amplify your presence or be more engaging or write better tweets based on semantics and so on and so on. I read a ton of them and compiled a list of actionable advice before coming to the realization that I’d rather crab walk on the highway than publish that article.

The fact is there isn’t a singular “right way” for using Twitter (or any other social media platform for that matter). It really depends on your business and your goals. Just know that the people you want to get in front of are already somewhere online. It’s up to you to figure how you want to connect with them.

For me, that means removing my ego from the equation. This isn’t about me; it’s about the people I’m trying to engage. That means that I need to spend more time interacting with the people in my network and less time pushing content in one direction (i.e., into a wall).

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos said, “We’ve found that Twitter has been a great way for us to connect on a more personal level with our employees and customers. We use it to help build our brand, not drive direct sales. It’d be like asking how does providing a telephone number for customer service translate into new business when they are mostly non-sales-related calls. In the long term, Twitter helps drive repeat customers and word of mouth, but we’re not looking to it as a way of driving immediate sales.”

How do you use Twitter?