One thing you will notice about Heart and Mind blog is that I am not on any social media, not even almighty twitter account. Everyone is tweeting and boosting the followers they have. I have been told it is one of the necessary evil process for being a successful blogger. Even my favorite minimalist blogger like Leo Baubuta of Zen Habit who has got rid of emails, Google, and other social media, is available only on twitter. Now, I have never chance to talk to my idol as he does not do email and I am not on twitter. I am big believer, if it meant to be, it will happen! I am sort of laid back (lazy) like that.

I am sure, it is almost a crime and suicide in terms of avoiding twitter and write a foolish post about it like this; but I am for being all transparent here so here it is;

If you have not heard of twitter or not on it, there has to a few reasons;
1. You are living under a rock
2. You actually have a life outside of internet

My reason is because, I actually live under the rock! I bet you did not know that!

While there are many sites, posts and blogs about how to use twitter to your advantages, and benefits of using twitter for you blog and your business, I will share an alternate views on it. And no, I am not twitter, bigamist. I have blog friends and other people I admire who are on twitter and I follow them (without twitter account), as I check out what they and others are saying and musing about in 140 word or less.

Without further ado, here are my top ten reason for not being on twitter:

1. Everyone has it and uses it: Now, if everyone does it, and if you do it too, it will not make you unique. Or it will make you unique just like everyone else. In my mom’s favorite term “If your all friends jumped off the cliff, would you do it too?”. No, you would not. I choose to follow some of friend’s idea such as being more positive in life but choosing twitter just because they are on it? It is not for me.
2. I want to say more than 140 characters: One of the reason I started blogging (out of many) is that I have a gift of gab and love to talk and share. 140 characters or less words is just not enough for me to convey my point. I want to share and say lot of words, say like 142. I can not do it with twitter. But sure, I can do it on my blog and and chat way with real life friends, who have no choice to shut me off at 140 words. I do not want to limit myself!
3. It is big time waster: How do I know? Just for fun, I check out other friends and blogger tweets and sure, I can spend minutes and hours reading same information over and over in different tweets. Yes, I follow my blog friends on twitter, without the account! So person like me, who is not twitter who can waste time like that, imagine for people who actually tweet and follow each others tweets, blogs and what not.
4. There are Spammers: There are good people and good information on twitter and blogs but many of them spammers and what is worse, there are spammer followers who are also spammers. It is hard to know who are genuine friends and who are not.
5. Most people do not care what you ate for breakfast: I see many tweets about such a meaningless tweets which has no meaning to anyone else but the tweeterer himself or herself. Many of us readers are selfish and only care of themselves, not many want to know what you ate for breakfast or how you are seeing clouds instead of working. Wait, I will take last one back, may be your boss cares about that one!
6. Lot of noise: Okay, twitter has no actual voice but you know what I am saying, with everyone tweeting around 10-100 tweets a day, it can be noisy and one has to filter through that noise to find what is relevant or even useful information.
7. No one is listening: Tweeting to me is like one way conversation, where people tell world what to read, what they are doing and re-tweeting and hardly any one is listening. Imagine going to a party, you are yelling out loud, “I am drinking coffee”, ” I am eating pizza with olives” and some one else is yelling ” I visited my friend and had drinks” and third person is saying, “Pizza with feta cheese is best”; Can you imagine? where no one responding or listening, twitter is party where everyone is talking and hardly anyone is listening unless you count RT tweets.
8. Fake ego booster: It can make you feel extremely powerful to say, “I got 200 followers in 3 days.” or ” I have 3498 more followers than you, so you should listen to me.” I actually see many blogs with twitter followers counts proudly displayed, but can you really be friends with 3498 people? Really, you believe that? Good for you if you do. However I think the opposite.
9. False insecurity: I know some people feel if they do not keep up with tweeting, they will lose their credibility or authority in internet. If people un-follows them, some can take it so personally. I know someone who checks her twitter account when she is on vacation as she does not want to lose any followers. That can not be good vacation. People follow and un-follow has nothing to do with you, it is all about THEM.
10. Paid advertisement: Many people have misconception of this rule but there are paid tweets, as large as $5000 for one tweet like John Chow gets for his sponsored tweets, depending on your authority and gazillion numbers of followers to influence them. trusting every tweet can be dangerous.

Here is a bonus reason to consider:

Down time: What do people do when twitter is down? And believe me, I have heard that there are some technical issues and downtime with twitter and some options keeps changing.

I have friends, I rather meet them,write to them, email them, phone them instead of tweeting them (is there such a word? Oh well, I just invented it).

Personal and Real Reason One of the main personal reason I am not on twitter or any social media is that I barely get a time to blog, read other blogs and comment with 2 little kids, homeschooling, and teaching at co-op school with other life’s tasks that we all must do. I do not want to be “too networked”. While my blog is small and growing slowly, one of my favorite blog Small Notebook by Rachel is very successful with 12,000 plus subscriber and that too without any social medias help, this gives me a hope that I might make it. There is another one of my blogging friend Raul from Alien Ghost and Carla Half Dozen Daily who are not on twitter, I am sure there are a few others who are in similar position.

I have made this choice mostly on time constraint and I know twitter can be very useful tool, if used right. Who knows what future holds, I may adapt if necessary but right now I am happy with my slow growth and slow blogging.

Update (Dec 17, 2012) after 3.5 years of blogging, heart and mind is finally on twitter (slow twitterer too) Zengirl9

see: Heart and mind is finally on twitter

Preeti AKA Zengirl

Image sources:
The evolution of communication: grove-marketing.com
The history of my blog cartoon: citizensound.net