Darren Rovell / CNBC Sports Business Reporter

Today, I will reach 50,000 followers on Twitter. I’m obviously honored, but the truth is the reason I’ve been able to grow so much in the space in the last year is because of you, my blog readers and my followers. You have told me what you want from me, whether it’s a salary stat or the numbers behind a certain sponsorship. You have given me information for me to tweet out to the masses and you have even proven me wrong. For that, I thank you. As we begin to think about 2011, I think about social media and Twitter in particular and how I can only see a big future for how sports fans will use the site in the coming year. I don’t consider myself the ultimate expert on this topic of course, but I thought I’d try to come up with a list of the most important things I’ve learned about Twitter in the past year. There will be many sports references in here because that’s the area I play in, but this advice is obviously pretty generic. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you can find me@darrenrovell.

1. You don’t have a 140 characters, you have 120 at the most

Remember, Twitter is not a monologue, it is a dialogue. You want people to engage with you, you want people to retweet you. If you use all 140 characters, the only choice they have is to click the retweet button, which means they can’t comment on it. I’ve found that my ideal tweets are about 100 characters. Including my 12-letter name, an RT, a space and the @ symbol, that’s 116 characters. My followers then have 24 characters to say what they want. Your number of characters are precious, so use link shortening sites like bit.ly or is.gd to reduce the amount of letters in your tweet.

2. This Isn’t A Popularity Contest

Twitter isn’t Facebook. It’s not a contest to collect as many friends as possible (I’ll follow you, if you follow me). If you genuinely use Twitter to follow others, you don’t want to clog your timeline with useless banter. Some people collect followers in order to grow their following. Don’t be in this business. If you are to use Twitter effectively, it’s not a popularity contest. I have found that if you truly are interested in using your Twitter feed, you can follow up to about 700 people. After that, a Twitter feed isn’t going to be an effective tool for you. Pare down your list every month so that you will be able to keep up with your changing interests and people who you realize aren’t providing you with useful information. If you pique interest, people will follow you. Trust me.

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