Listen, learn, appreciate and share are the four lessons I’ve learnt from 5,000 tweets as @DuncanChapple. A “tweetaversary” is an arbitrary and trivial landmark but, looking back, it’s been a valuable experience.

Most importantly, I’ve realised that it’s important to listen to the silences as well as the messages on twitter. In the analyst industry, for example, there are people I follow closely and who influence me a lot, like Richard Stennion and Pim Bilderbeek. However, it’s really important to remember that a lot of the discussion is concealed on twitter by languages (I follow people who tweet in four European languages, but I’m missing out on the languages in which most tweets are written, including Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, and Italian). More importantly, most people are not using twitter at all

Learning is actually rather hard to do. Using Klout, I had a look at my influence landscape. Despite the global nature of twitter, most of the people who influence me most deeply are people I’ve met here in London, and are friends on facebook as well as on twitter. That suggests to me that there’s a strong interplay between the online and offline, and that face-to-face meetings, even if they are few, provide an essential glue.

I hugely appreciate what Twitter has to offer. Certainly, twitter’s produced a number of benefits for me, both large and small. It’s a great way to stay in touch with people, especially by direct message where people are are often much more candid, and it’s allowed me to reconnect with very old friends – even people I have not seen since I was a teenager.

It’s also been a great opportunity for sharing. I’m especially fascinated by the way we share lists of people. I’ve been added to around 65 lists on twitter, by people who for one reason or another think I have something useful to say about AR, tech, influence relations, marketing operations, mobility, PR, social media, productivity, non-profits, the arts and film-making.There’s a lot to discover there: what are sources I am drawing on, and what are the conversations I am (perhaps unknowlingly) part of.

What have you learnt from twitter?