I too only follow relevant Twitterers. There is only so much time, so why clutter up your life with junk you don’t need. I hate spam and I hate it when people are constantly pushing their wares at me.

Twitter is a place to connect, not an never ending commercial. I would never do that to someone, I don’t want them doing it to me. That’s what’s great about Twitter. You can follow who you want.

I’ve met some fantastic people through Twitter that I may never have found otherwise. I think it is an excellent tool!

The first thing we learned about is all the non-productive chit-chat; and running into a couple of people who bombard, over and over again, a link to their website that seems more than a bit rude.

The fun part was seeing an enormous amount of traffic to our sites in one day; didn’t sell anything but the attention may turn into something!

You’re absolutely right about taking the time to have a good think about what you want to achieve before spending a lot of valuable time on social sites.

Also that it’s a good idea to keep the time you invest in those sites proportionate to the value you get from them.

As far as using any of it for my jewelry business, I decided my best bet was to determine:

1) Who do I want to connect with – my targeted customers, other jewelry artists, or ???

2) Where do those people I want to connect with hang out online?

3) Of those online gathering spots, which one(s) do I like best – as far as how they’re set up to get around, the way members can participate there, the kind of folks who hang out there, the ease of connecting with people in a useful way, etc.?

Then pick just one or two social sites to focus on, and ignore the rest until you’re ready at some point either to expand into using more social sites, or to drop the ones you’ve been using and try a new one.

Not all social sites are useful or user-friendly. And not all of them resonate with everyone. Also DEFINITELY not all of them provide value for the time you spend on them!

I’ve found that for me, some of the really popular sites have turned out to be ones that I personally don’t enjoy at all.

I try to keep social networking at a level where it’s fun and I’m getting value from it, yet it doesn’t start eating into the other things I need to do for my business.

I just pick the site(s) I want to concentrate on currently, and on “computer days” I spend about 30 minutes total socializing / networking on my chosen sites.

And you’re right, most social sites probably have a finite lifespan and will either evolve to keep up with the times, or eventually fade out while other sites take their place.

I used to feel that out of politeness I should follow everyone who followed me. But I did a “follow purge” recently, because I’d politely followed several folks whose tweets provided more clutter than value for me.

In the process of “unfollowing” them, I discovered that nearly all of those clutter-tweeters weren’t in the jewelry industry anyway. Most of them are in “internet marketing” or “social media”, where their main goal is amassing huge lists of followers and then tweeting various forms of advertising to them. Yuck.

So after “unfollowing” all the non-relevant junk tweeters on my list, I now have a wonderful list of jewelry folk I love to connect with, and whose tweets I love to read!

It made a huge difference in the quality of my Twitter experience.

I decided it’s like the rest of the social media universe – it’s best to focus on connecting with quality folks who share my interests!