Sixteen Thousand Tweets Later: Five Wins and Zero Losses

I’ve just hit a milestone — 16,000 tweets:

Assuming that on every one of those 16,000 tweets I spent some 10 seconds, that’s 160,000 seconds, or 2,667 minutes, or nearly 44.5 hours spent tweeting. One would think: “what a waste of time!” writing these hours into the “Losses” column. I disagree.

Looking back, and analyzing the “Wins” I can say that if I had a second chance, I would’ve done it again. There are at least 5 very tangible outcomes to which my regular tweeting has contributed.

These are:

1. 3,000+ loyal followers — Think: spreading of blog content, crowdsourcing, support in contests like this one, ongoing education, and ability to find answer to nearly any question within seconds.
2. At least 5 speaking engagements — Several of these were paid ones, while those that weren’t helped me land several training, consulting and management projects.
3. Book contract with a major publisher — When speaking with a prospective author among the factors every publisher considers now is social media presence, and social influence.
4. Contribution to steady blog growth — Think: social sharing, traffic increase… and, ultimately, influence on such revenue sources as advertising, for example.
5. Connections, connections, connections… — …which resulted in interviews, leads, barter arrangements, etc.

Are you on Twitter? How do you leverage it? What do you get from it?