1.  Share: I try to share any content that I think should be considered important to everyone and I try to share interesting content from my employer (@wcnc).

2.  Learn: Lots of folks, including journalists, celebrities and the like use Twitter as a promotional tool–to push their ideas and agendas.  But Twitter is a constant conversational stream, and I try to use it this way.  It’s not a one way street.  I try to learn something of value both personally and professionally through at least one outlet/friend/stranger every day.

3.  Teach: Twitter could make each of us so much smarter if we used it to combine our innate knowledge.  I try to join the conversation and share my knowledge and add value to my audience (followers) as much as I can without coming across as a stuck up know-it-all.  We each are smart in our own way and having something of value to add, and sharing that for the betterment of the conversation is pivotal.

4.  Smile: Each day I try to either make someone smile via one of my tweets or I myself see something on Twitter that makes me chuckle, smirk or laugh.  This is arguably the most important of my four daily Twitter goals.

Notice in all four points I used the word “try.”  None of us are perfect, but I think if you can check mark at least three of these points every single day you will get more out of the medium, your audience (followers) will grow and you’ll come back more often.  You may even make your employer happy, reconnect with old friends or make new ones.

Am I missing a step? Tweet me @CalebTroop.

But what’s curious is seeing how obsessive media outlets are at “winning” with Twitter, and I’m beginning to wonder if this obsession is actually warranted. 

At its best, Twitter is a free and open wire service.  It’s where you go to learn things first, and for many TV stations, newspapers, etc. it’s where that breaking news is shared first.

But why, and should it be that way?

Twitter doesn’t always drive traffic to one’s website (even for tweets that do include links), and loyalty among outlets is low.  People just want their information, and they move on.

But in a breaking news situation, Twitter is often way ahead of every other news sharing platform—a company’s website, a breaking news text, Facebook post, breaking news email, mobile push, etc.

Why?

We’ve already seen studies showing that the public cares relatively little who is first at breaking a story, so why do we bend over backwards to get it out on Twitter without first posting it on a website or any other platform?

The problem is we can’t quantify how important a new follower or a retweet is, but every day outlets choose it’s more important than a page view by sending an often link-lacking tweet out to the masses the second they hear of and confirm a breaking news story.

It may help that company’s image and brand awareness, but it may also hurt the bottom line if that story gets far fewer clicks. If people aren’t going to your website or flipping to your channel, how valuable is Twitter, really?  At the end of the day, Twitter is a marketing tool, too.

Oh, and how are paywalls in journalism going to work when the journalists themselves don’t think this information is worth holding off from social media?

Companies are increasingly choosing that brand awareness (hey, look, I just saw the NY Times is reporting XYZ on Twitter) is more important than clicks.

Is there a sure fire solution or written code everyone should follow?  Heck no, but raising the question is a start: What medium should companies go to when they break news first?

Monday’s buzz about how big a hit Super Bowl XLVI was in the social media world is exactly that.

We saw headline, after headline, after headline all saying the same thing.

On Sunday, Twitter set a sporting event record with 12,233 tweets-per-second at its peak, up from 4,064 TPS in the 2011 Super Bowl.  Those numbers circled the conversation back to how great the game was, but Sunday’s tweets-per-second record says more about Twitter than it does the Super Bowl.

Outlining how Twitter is that much more engrained in our lives is hard to quantify, but the Super Bowl Twitter numbers show exactly that.  Sunday’s social media numbers say more about the rise of the medium than anything else, and that fact I think has gotten overlooked thus far.

What people are missing is the fact that undoubtedly more sporting and non-sporting Twitter records will be set (Olympics?, Oscars?) in the coming weeks, months and years because Twitter is growing so rapidly and is now a viable medium.

The real story here is Twitter’s growth, not the competitiveness and wildness of the Super Bowl.

Hopefully the headlines and the copy in the to-be-written stories about those future records will talk a bit more about Twitter’s growth and less about the event.