Each Friday, in honor of the #FollowFriday tradition on Twitter, we will be featuring one of our own Featured Users on the blog.

This week, we were fortunate to do our interview in person with David Hoang, who was the winner of our contest at the 140 Twitter Conference in Los Angeles. We asked conference members to tell us in 140 characters (or less) why they wanted more followers. The prize for the best answer was 20,000 impressions. David’s answer can be found here. You can follow David on Twitter, and be sure to check out his website, featuring Twitter-inspired paintings and drawings!

Interview Transcript:

Hi, this is Sarah Vela for Featured Users and we are doing our Follow Friday interview a couple days early, because I’m here with David Hoang who won our Featured Users contest today at the 140 Twitter Conference. Say hello to David.

Hello.

Hi David. Glad to have you with us and congratulations on winning our contest!

Thank you! I was really excited, thanks for having me.

David has won 20,000 impressions on Featured Users, and also we’re going to feature him on our Follow Friday blog post which we do every Friday for one of our Featured Users. The first question we ask everybody, which is sort of obvious, is tell us about yourself.

I am a visual artist that uses Twitter a lot as a medium, whether it’s engaging with the community or using it as inspiration for my work. I’ve been drawing and painting for 20-some years, and when I got connected to Twitter I saw the infinite value it had for an artist to use it.

How did you first come to be on Twitter?

I started in I think May of ’07.

Pretty early.

Yeah. Quite some time ago in the Twitter lifetime. I first started using it and it was really hard because I didn’t know anyone so I followed my brother and five other friends. I had about six followers and didn’t really use it. And then I started searching for people and realized that it’s not about just people you know, but people you want to know and get to know, so I randomly started following people that had the same interest in art, and now i use it all the time. Apparently 14 times a day, according to TweetStats.

Where are you located?

I live in Seattle, Washington.

What’s your favorite thing about Seattle?

i think the diversity. It’s diverse in all sorts of ways, all types of people. It’s definitely a melting pot of culture, and for an artist it’s a great place to be in, where you can be inspired by all sorts of people, places and things.

What are you most excited about sharing with your followers on Twitter?

I like sharing ideas. Whether it’s them giving me ideas, or me giving them ideas. When I work on a drawing or a painting I like to send in progress work, post that, so they can see what I’m doing and get some feedback too, that’s positive or negative. Some people send me @ replies like “I’m not really feeling this one” and it helps me. It’s a good critique. I want to make art for the people that are interested in it, so it’s nice to hear straight from them.

What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not online?

Oh boy. Keyword is when I’m not online. I like to go to the coffee shop sometimes and just disconnect. Just turn off my phone and leave the laptop at home and just read. Or I just like having conversations with people. Twitter conversation is one thing, but another thing is having a face to face conversation, and i think Twitter can lead you to have these face to face conversations with these people that you’re interacting with.

Absolutely. Well, it was good to have a face to face conversation with you today David, and congratulations again on winning our contest. We’re glad to have you with Featured Users.

Thank you, I really enjoyed it. Happy tweeting.

Thanks.