Sounds simple enough. I've heard about Twitter enough to have a pretty good working knowledge of the platform. You tweet messages in 140 characters, you employ the use of hashtags (Let me tell you about my theory of the beauty of hashtags. No really.) to categorize postings. It's kind of neat because celebrities and CEOs and politicians are on Twitter and they will respond to you personally, and you can retweet things you want to share. Ok, good, I got it.
ERRR!! WRONG! I have no idea how to use Twitter!
Joining Twitter has been an extremely confusing activity. I don't know what's appropriate to post on Twitter and what's not, I don't know if I should be posting personal thoughts or if I should only be posting links to content. I don't like that people post photos but they're links you have to click on to see the photo. I wanted to retweet tweets(?) from people I'm following to #si643, but I can't alter the text of a retweet to put the hashtag there. The fact that I'm following almost exclusively professionals in my field makes me extremely wary of posting anything for fear of being unprofessional, and then the idea of gaining more personal contacts on Twitter doubles that fear. How come when I use the hashtag, sometimes my tweet shows up when I click on the hashtag link, and other times it doesn't? I'm not sure how to attribute other people in a tweet, so I have resorted to saying "From @______:" because the retweet option isn't what I want, and I don't know the proper way to do it! I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND.
Also, Barack Obama has been spamming my feed(?) all day about the success of ACA. I mean, every two minutes. Literally. Is this normal? I just completely don't understand the norms of Twitter and it's freaking me out! I think I need someone to sit with me like I'm 75 and talk me through it. Man, life is going to be hard when I'm actually old and have a hard time learning new things!
What I do like is that it's apparently totally normal to follow people you have never met, and so growing a professional network is much easier on Twitter than Facebook. In fact, it was kind of exciting when I posted something by someone I follow (using my make-shift "From:" attribution tag), and they retweeted it! That was neat. And then since I saw that person later give a shout out wishing all the #nightlibrarian 's a good night, I had to respond to that, since I'm on the desk currently. That was fun. I might be slowly getting the hang of some small aspect of this Twitter thing, after all.
Side-note on the pervasiveness of the hashtag, when I was in Alaska visiting my friend, one of her students had hashtagged the title of his/her essay, as well as the MLA heading. Handwritten. On paper. Example:
#English10
#MsWaldrup
#3rdhour
#The Conch in The Lord of the Flies
Just saying.
Twitter on your computer is different from Twitter on your phone. I can retweet and alter the tweet on my phone in a way I can't on my computer. That may answer one of your questions.
ReplyDeleteI also followed Obama for 2 days...which happened right during the government shut down....which is why I ended up only following him for 2 days.
I completely understand your frustration with Twitter! But it is because of Twitter that I discovered Scoop.It. a really fascinating site where users posts articles from around the internet with their comments. This has been the highlight of my Twitter experience!
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree with your confusion about Twitter! I still have no idea how to use most of it (what's the difference between RT and MT...?), so it took me about an hour to figure out how to retweet and add something before Mollie told me. For such a pervasive social media site, it doesn't seem to be particularly user friendly! And like Jackie mentioned...apparently the Twitter app on your phone is way easier than Twitter on your computer, which is strange. But you're not alone with your confusion!
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