PROMPT SIX FOR “BLOGGING FOR SCRAPBOOKERS” CLASS:
Setting goals and taking journeys
I love setting goals, long-term and short. Every day presents you with a fresh opportunity to work on the goal and feel that you’re changing your life.
Can getting more Twitter followers change my life? Your reaction might be an immediate “Of course not!”
But give me a moment to change your mind.
Have you ever read about the butterfly effect? Wikipedia defines it this way: “The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely, a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere. Although this may appear to be an esoteric and unusual behavior, it is exhibited by very simple systems.”
In popular culture terms the concept of the butterfly effect is frequently referred to through the novelty of a minor change in circumstances causing a large change in outcome.
So, how do I tie this back to growing my Twitter following? Simply by conceiving of the possibility that by interacting with more people who have similar interests and goals I have a better chance of running into a person who can benefit from what I have to give or who knows the very person I should meet. Because every action has an effect on other probabilities, all it takes is one, right?
So that’s my newest short-term goal: To grow my newly established Twitter account from my current 28 followers (blush) to 100 by May 1st (without following lots of random people just to get follows back). I think it’s doable, and I’ll pop in periodically to let you know how I’m progressing.
If any of you have suggestions for good ways to make this happen, I would certainly appreciate a quick comment with your wisdom.
Oh, and won’t you please follow me on Twitter? 😉
I just followed you! So cool to know that others close to me (Austin is about 3 hours from me) are also taking Shimelle’s course. I’m mcscraps4 on Twitter.
I agree that good things do come from Twitter! When I was using it daily, I did several things to help followers find me:
1) had an RSS stream coming into Google Reader with tweets with my keywords in them, so I could check out people who were tweeting about my topic
2) followed other people and built electronic rapport with them
3) met people in the real world with similar interests and found them on twitter.
Good luck!
Thank you so much, Katie! These are great ideas, and I’ll try them all. You know, I’ve read that a lot of people just follow tons of random people in order to get follows back and build their numbers. But that doesn’t work for me because I hope to actually build rapport with my little group, as you mentioned. Otherwise, I don’t much see the point in participating.