I believe that in order to get the most of microblogging, you can’t think of things in terms of “business”.  My personal opinion is that your friends list represents a supportive community of people whom you’ve come to know as your friends. By sharing bits of your lives, you get to know each other. Whether or not your update talks about what you had for dinner, or a new blog post you made or just read - the point is that the community is centered around the idea that you share things with each other.

Build Your Community First

It is important to build your community and get to know people. Add people as your friends if you feel they’ll be a good addition to your community. Also, if people add you as a friend, add them back. You may want to send them a note thanking them for accepting your friend request for initiating a friend request with you.

The next thing is to start participating. I’d participate for a day or two before throwing in links to your blog, website, or your list’s squeeze page. Join in on the conversations. Give some link love - when you read a great blog post, tell your friends and encourage them to read. Talk about what you had for dinner, what your cat is doing, your favorite songs, etc. Give people a glimpse into your personality.

Then You Can Share Your Business

After you do that, you can start telling people when you post at your blog, or nudging them to sign up for your newsletter, or both. Just make sure you’re still participating in conversations and doing what you were doing to help show people your personality and and build community. The beauty of microblogging is that it just takes minutes to do all that.

Are Your Friends a List?

In a way, your friends list on any of the social sites, can be considered “your list” but not in a traditional sense - in a social way.  Calling it a list seems to give people the wrong idea… but I can’t seem to find the right way to call it. It’s a “friends list”. And it still accomplishes a similar thing as a traditional opt-in list. For example, I noticed that I get a fair amount of traffic from sites like twitter, plurk, and stumbleupon and a good percentage of that traffic is from my friends list.

Remember, make friends, share things, direct traffic to your website, blog, or squeeze page for your opt-in list. But the focus needs to be “making friends” or else you miss the point.