Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about Twitter and whether it is the ultimate tool for communication or if it has been abused by ruthless self-promoters (I’m definitely not one of those ). A few months ago while using Twitter I started noticing that people were promoting their blog posts via the site. I decided to join in on the fun and now see the benefits of notifying people of new posts.

I have heard other people say that this automated model of self-promotion is unacceptable and that it is simply cluttering their Twitter stream. For myself, I feel as though posting blog posts is a relatively uneventful twitter update and really doesn’t cross the threshold of continuous self promotion that we are beginning to witness on the site. As I’ve been reiterating for the past two days, the social web is most effective for building brand you.

The techniques used to build brand you could be to simply write a blog post once a day or alternatively to write each post and tell as many people about it as possible in the hope that they’ll tell their friends. I myself have leveraged a number of guerrilla social web marketing practices and so have a number of other people that I know of. Just ask Jesse Thomas how to market yourself and he’ll give you 500 ways to drive traffic to your site.

So the question remains, what is proper Twitter etiquette? Where’s the line when promoting yourself? Are there any rules? Perhaps out of this discussion we can create a guide to Twitter etiquette.