Twitter is an enigma, The potential to use it for good,to break news and also to make money is undisputed. On the other hand The “signal to Noise Ratio”  can be prohibitive. For those of you who don’t know what signal to noise ration is let me explain with the help of Wikipedia.

“Signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as useful twwets) to the level of background noise(sales pitches and other useless tweets). The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is.”

So basically the less background noise the better the signal to noise ratio… On twitter the noise is the pointless constant spamming or poor quality tweets someone makes. I once followed someone who tweets solely consisted of what music they were listening to.. At the other end of the spectrum I got 50 tweets from one1 person in a day promoting GDI..the seller of those pointless .ws domains. Did either of the tweeple think they were being useful and helpful?

I’ve recently used the method I laid out in the Free Twitter Tips and Tricks book I released last week to build up over 3000 followers in the past month. I now have a responsibility to provide useful interesting information to those followers and not constant sales messages. Personally I like to follow people who inspire me and with whom I can enter into conversations so why shouldn’t I try to follow that example. Unfortuatly many of these people get lost in the constant background noise so the question is how to Deal with it.

I think the obvious answer is to go through my twitter account and remove people who don’t provide a good signal to noise ratio. Personally I don’t mind getting tweets that are sales pitches, I’ve often found very useful ideas and products this way bit I don’t want to be bombarded with them.

If everyone adopted a policy of only following people who posted interesting and useful tweets 80% of the time Twitter would be a far more useful place..

Thats my Views and I’ve probably missed something obvious. As an internet marketer am I being a hypocrite? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or sending a tweet.

You’ll have seen that the blog updates towards the end of 2008 were a bit irregular. I think I was suffering from a bit of burn out. I had 4 projects on the go, a house move to organise and as a result I wasn’t feeling very creative. I’ve pretty much taken the last 6 weeks off just spending an hour or two a day keeping things ticking over and working with my mentoring students and as a result I am back and the creative juices are flowing again.

My plans for the coming year are firming up nicely and I am focussing more on what I really enjoy, the coaching and forum aspects of my business. As a result I am doing one to one coaching here in Spain and building a massive update to the Income Academy forum. I am also creating a reasonable quality portable recording studio so that I can increase the quality of the videos I produce.

The First topic I want to cover on the blog this year is Twitter, I don’t think it’s a secret that I don’t particularly like Social networking sites. I never saw the point of MySpace and Facebook , If I haven’t talked to you for 10 years there is probably a good reason for it!

I did think the same was true of twitter but I am starting to see the light in fact so much so that I intent to ditch my underused mailing lists and concentrate on daily tweets instead. I think it makes sense most people use mailing lists to promote products, I think in the whole of last year I found 2 or 3 products worth promoting. On the other hand I daily find useful sites and tips.

By the time I got to write an email and send it out then I usually forgot about the stuff I’d found or I couldn’t fit all the tips into the email. To me switching to twitter makes sense. Obviously the first thing I need to do is to provide a good guide to using twitter to my subscribers so that they know how best to use it.. (I only found Tweetdeck myself a few days ago!) So If you can recommend a good twitter resource let me know.

If you have a twitter account you can follow me at http://twitter.com/m_j_thompson

Now that I am back and refreshed expect to read more of my rambling over the next few weeks