A Difficult Decision Regarding Twitter

When I first began on Twitter, I was stunned that there were people out there who not only wanted to follow me but were also willing to retweet my book announcements. I've now reached the point where I have over 5,000 Twitter followers and wake up every morning to dozens of retweets. I get dozens more during the day and what I used to do was thank each person individually, click over to their Twitter stream and retweet something of theirs.

As my list of followers grew, I found that this was taking up more and more of my time. I started a list, "People I like to RT" and would go through that every day. Then I started thanking people in batches for their RTs and mentions.

Now even that is becoming too overwhelming. On top of that, Twitter, for some reason, is really sketchy about sending me the email announcements when someone RTs or mentions me, so I'm missing tons of people in my "thank you" Tweets.

All the time I spend putting people on "thank you" lists, searching for tweets of theirs for me to RT, and just generally trying to manage everything going on on Twitter is just taking too much of my time. So beginning today, I have decided that I am not going to send out the "thank you" tweets any longer. If you do RT or mention me, know that I am, of course, thankful for it. And while I won't immediately RT you, I will try to keep track of those who regularly RT me and return the favor from time to time.

This is a difficult decision for me because it causes me great distress to think that someone might find me rude or unappreciative. It is simply not the case, and that is why I am writing this post rather than just stopping the thank yous without notice.

But in compensation, I am doing something now, which you may have seen me Tweet about the past week or so. If you want me to RT something specific, just add "#RT @MichaelKRose" to the end of it (without the quote marks) and I will RT it as soon as I see it. I will try to do this without fail to anyone who adds that to their tweet, assuming it is a Tweet relevant to the interests of my followers and not vulgar or crude in any way. I'll also be tweeting this daily so everyone knows how to get an RT from me:

Writer friends, want me to #RT your book? Just put "#RT @MichaelKRose" (without quote marks) at the end so I'm sure to see it!

I'd like to again thank everyone who has been so helpful and generous. I will, of course, continue to chat with people who tweet to me, and I hope that many of you will add the "#RT @MichaelKRose" tag to your tweets so I can continue to return all the kindness so many have shown me.

Best,
Michael K. Rose