Twitter is whatever you want it to be. It may be your personal log of the number of tacos you eat or your personal branding platform. All uses are acceptable, but with Twitter’s recent mainstream growth and hat tips from big media, tweeting can be stressful even at 140 characters.

If you are finding yourself getting worked up about your Twitter account, questioning how you are using it and lost in the noise of social media experts telling you this or that, you may need to step back and rediscover why you became addicted to tweeting in the first place.

Here are my steps on how to get back to the fundamentals that will have you falling in love with Twitter again:

Trim your following list

Cut out all the noise and trim your following list down to the people that really matter to you. One of the basic rules I use is if I don’t recognize your name or know why I followed you in the first place you are gone. Think of it this way, if you never see their tweets, are you really following them anyways?

Trim your following list and next time you log on you will be relieved by not having to go back ten plus pages to make sure you didn’t miss out on something.

Tweet with your BFFs

Twitter doesn’t just have to be for work or finding the latest news on the internet. Chances are your friends or family are on Twitter and there is a good chance you got them started, so let them know what you are up to in a tweet.

Forget your follower count

Follower count was the gold rush of 2008, though many are starting to wake up and realize it was closer to fool’s gold. If you are checking your follower count and changing your behavior because of it, you are probably introducing unneeded stress to your Twittering. Turn off your unfollow notifications, stop checking your follower count and just let the numbers happen organically.

Take a personal branding vacation

For a few days forget what the personal branding experts are saying and throw out those rules you have built around your Twittering habits. Give yourself a week off and just use Twitter. It will help make things easier and hopefully you will find out the world doesn’t blow up when you stop doing what the experts tell you to do.

Meet your Twitter friends in real life

Take your Twitter network to the streets and starting meeting people face to face. If you haven’t attended a tweetup before, make an effort to attend the next one. If your community hasn’t organized one before be the person who gets it started. In Des Moines, the first tweetup started with just six people but over the last year they have grown to be self organizing gatherings of 80-100+ tweeps.

Not ready for a tweetup? Not a problem. Next time you are getting ready to head out for coffee or lunch tweet it and invite others to join you.

Trust the community

If there is big news or something you shouldn’t miss out on it will get retweeted. Trust the community to bubble up news to you.

There is no wrong way to tweet, but with all of the hype and talk about Twitter it can be easy to burn out. Instead of throwing in the towel, try getting back to the fundamentals of what made Twitter fun in the first place.

Most importantly, Twitter became famous by breaking all of the rules, so don’t fall into the trap of making rules for yourself (or others) on how to use it.