20 Twitter Resolutions for Twenty Eleven

On 31st December 2010, I tweeted a series of tweets as part of a hashtag (#suggestedtwitterresolution)

What started with just a random attempt to suggest new year resolutions to people who tweet, turned into an interactive discussion with people replying and contributing ideas. Here's the top 20 off the list, for anyone who may want to pick all (requires a lot of time and effort) or some of these as their resolutions for 2011:

1. Engage with the people you follow and get to know them.Twitter is best used with a combination of tweets in monologue and dialog modes.
2. Interact with people you follow, even if they don't follow you back. It's the only way they'll get to know you.
3. Try and reply to tweets from people who follow you, even if you don't follow them back. The conversations could lead you to discover some interesting people and you may just be interested in following them back.
4. Stop counting your tweets and start making your tweets count.
5. Focus on collecting thoughts, ideas and information, not followers
6. Respect attention spans. Don't expect people to read, reply to or RT everything you tweet about.
7. Tweet about what interests *you* and it doesn't (always) have to be a link.
8. Don't let your twitter timeline look like a press-release. Unless, it is.
9. *Try* to be yourself in 140 characters. And have fun while you're at it
10. *Try* to keep your tweets grammar-grounded and spelling-sane.
11. Try not 2 twt lyk dis. Use complete words and sentences unless where the 140 character limitation is really pressing upon you to cut short on the number of characters.
12. Respect mutual rights of all to follow / unfollow / block whoever they want without having to justify.
13. Use twitter lists to discover, organize and recommend interesting people.
14. Don't tweet when you're too angry. Or too drunk. You may regret what you posted later and it will be too late to take back what you said by then.
15. If you don't have anything to tweet about, don't. Meanwhile, you could retweet interesting tweets that appear in your timeline.
16. Engage in conversations but when they get personal or irrelevant for others on the timeline, move to direct messages.
17. Try your hand at a couple of twitter apps till you find the one that best complements your tweeting style
18. Don't get into fights on twitter. If you're offended by someone's opinion, ignore / block and move on.
19. *Occasionally* indulge in random hashtags. This post was a result of one such hashtag tweeting session.
20. Make the most of 140 characters.

That's my list of suggested twitter resolutions for the new year.

Have a great 2011. And remember, all's well that tweets well.