Fun with Twitter

The internet is full of great articles, written by experts, about how to effectively use the social media site, Twitter. This is not one of them.

Instead, this is my story about how I have fumbled and bumbled on the site since I joined in September 2009, what I’ve learned, and the things I’m trying today to turn it into a valuable tool for me.

When I first heard about Twitter the name sounded funny to me, the act of tweeting funnier still and I decided I would ignore it. But, over the next few months I heard about celebrities, politicians and other influential people tweeting and thought it might be something I should at least try to understand.

Not having any idea what I was doing, I created a profile using the only decent picture of myself in existence and started to follow people. Twitter suggests people you might want to follow, but before you’ve built up any kind of history they can use to “profile” you, the suggestions are mostly celebrities. Accepting their suggestions, I set out to build close, personal relationships with the likes of Britney Spears, Demi Moore, Barack Obama and Shaquille Oneal.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t getting a lot of value from my news feed of tweets. Britney seems to travel a lot and really loves her fans. Demi also loves her fans, but has a really odd picture of herself which I find distracting. Obama seems like a positive chap who likes to give little sound bites. Shaquille says very little, all of it misspelled. I started to wonder if Twitter was for me.

I was disappointed that my witty and informative tweets weren’t gaining me followers by the dozens and requests to be interviewed by CNN. I studied the tweets of others that were “retweeted” hoping I could learn their secret, but discovered that Lindsay Lohan can stub her toe and get retweeted while nothing short of providing the location of the holy grail from me (in 140 characters no less!) would even be considered.

Twitter allows users to create lists of people and soon after I joined someone in India added me to a list of “celebrities.” While I may well be a celebrity in India, I suspect this is a case of mistaken identity that I will make no effort to ever correct. Perhaps this can work in my favour.

I’ve learned that Twitter is rife with spammers, using pictures of some of the most attractive people in their profile pictures that I’ve ever seen. If you happen to actually be that attractive, you will want to take extra steps to make it clear you are not going to provide information on “great deals” 479 times a day.

While not in the spammer category, I have also been put off by those who use automated responses when you follow them, directing you to a Facebook page, offering free gifts, stopping just short of saying “hey buddy, do you want to buy a letter M?” The spirit of Twitter is about building relationships and I’d run the other way from this type of person in real life.

Trending topics are a great way of being alerted to breaking news stories that might be of interest. The list loses its appeal for me though when items like “Phineas and Ferb” appear for days and days for no reason or the inclusion of items like #snakebitmyface that simply defy explanation.

While I’m still a long way from reaching my Twitter goals, I’ve figured out some things that work for me and the experience is improving steadily. I’m adding followers each day (real people!) and creating content I hope they find useful and/or entertaining.

I still haven’t completely figured out hashtags and just yesterday I sent a message to myself when I tried to thank someone for retweeting one of my blog posts.

Clearly, I still have some work to do.

I noticed tonight that two boys from Stratford, myself and Justin Beiber, now have a combined 12, 179, 372 followers.

Obviously, I’m doing something right.