Skip the cat tweets, says Guy Kawasaki, and use Twitter to engage

Entrepreneur has built a large, devoted following with news from around the Web

Instead, Kawasaki has built up his healthy audience by pushing out interesting news items to his followers. “I want page views and followers,” Kawasaki said, noting that he sees Twitter as a way to drive traffic to his various ventures, such as news aggregation website Alltop.com. “So, the way you get them is to tweet interesting stuff.”

How to be interesting on Twitter? It helps if you’re famous, Kawasaki said. “If Lance Armstrong says on Twitter that he just got a flat tire on his bike, everyone cares. If I say I got a flat tire in Menlo Park, no one cares. The rest of us who are not celebrities cannot do that. So the bulk of what I do on Twitter is to find interesting stuff and tweet it out.”

Though Kawasaki himself does not engage in much back-and-forth with his Twitter followers, he does see the value in using Twitter for connecting to key audiences—especially for brands. However, when he first checked out Twitter three years, he thought, “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “If your first reaction to Twitter is not the same, then you fail the IQ test.”