It's all well and good providing a walled garden for yourself. Venting, putting feelers out for a new job and interacting with friends all seems like a great idea to do behind a lock, but it gets in the way of making new connections.
I've protected my Twitter feed for several months now. The reasons were varied; I was conscientious that clients would get a peek at some of the conversations I was having (not that they were anything above G-rated), I wanted to focus more on getting traffic to my blog instead of my microblog, and I needed to be aware of any kickback (real or perceived) from some of my personal views was now out there. I felt that my Twitter account, as a microblog, could provide a bit more of a personal view - rather than here on this blog where I kept a lot held back.
The drawback to this is that any time I followed someone, they were immediately met with "This Person Protects Their Updates." Not great for personal branding or engaging in community. Sure, if you're a very well known person who has an established name for yourself, this isn't a problem. You can filter people out without feeling like you're losing out on the chance to engage with people in the industry. I have a big desire to build relationships with people in the SEM industry, and felt like I couldn't do that protecting my Twitter stream.
Then, there was the naïve belief that a bunch of people were really, really rude. I'd send @replies to people, and get nothing back, even when the tweet was helpful or interesting (in my opinion, obviously). I'm embarrassed to admit that I only recently realized that if people weren't following me, my @replies were stuck behind my walled garden; I apologize unreservedly to the people who I'd pegged to be rude, egotistical and pretty pleased with themselves. If it's any consolation, I stewed privately rather than tweet about it in my garden. That having been said, I think a lot of people would agree that good Twitter etiquette suggests that you reply to @replies (ok, unless you're @wilw or @barackobama or @stephenfry with gazillions of followers and no realistic expectation of a response), even if it's just @bakerash thanks. Margaret Mason has a very entertaining post about this on The Morning News.
So here we are today - why I finally decided to unprotect my Twitter stream. Broken record time - engagement, relationship, community. If it means exposing myself a bit more, then I'm cool about that. Let's talk.
