Disclaimer: I am not saying that everyone evolves in the way described in this post.  However, I do believe it is a trend.

Here are the steps I believe many people go through

Stage 1: What the heck is this thing? What a waste of time. Most of the people on here are talking about nothing (or at least nothing of interest to me)

Stage 2: Why does everyone keep raving about Twitter? Maybe I should take another look. Hmm, I am starting to find some interesting people. I will log in periodically to check out what they have to say.

Stage 3: I am finding more and more interesting people to follow. People are starting to follow me, too! I find myself checking Twitter more and more often now. I am using ________ (Fill in the blank with TweetDeck, Seesmic, TweetGrid, etc…) and it makes everything so much easier.

Stage 4: What fun it is to track how many people are starting to follow me. I am now thinking about things I can Twitter throughout the day. I check it and post several times a day and I am finding it hard to keep up with the flow of information. I have found TwitterGrader to keep track of my progress.

Stage 5: This is getting to be too much of a drain. I am going to have to be OK with the fact that some things will get posted that I will not see. I have found hashtags. They make it so much easier to just track topics of interest. I am starting to use Twitter for my business and have found some tools like hootsuite that are very helpful.

Stage 6: Some of my hashtags are actually communities. They have Twitter chats which take place weekly and all the members support each other. TweetChat and twebevent are two apps that I use to take place in these community discussions.

Stage 7: I don’t watch my main Twitter stream at all now. I am using _______ (TweetDeck etc..) to create saved searches and groups. I have a few Tweeple subsets that I check their streams as a group. Otherwise I just check hashtags and participate in Twitter Chats. I am getting to be friends with several of the Tweeple in the Chats. I have even phoned a few of them to share ideas. They are all so knowledgeable and helpful.

Stage 8: You tell me. What happens next?

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Tagged: evolution, stages, twitter, Twitter-use