Friday, November 18, 2011

On which I admit my tweet confusion

I have leaped into the twitter world.  Well, "leaped" may not be the best word for it, more of a tiny step around the corner to check it out without disturbing the party.  I'm not sure if I'm going to stay.

Here's the thing.  I don't really get it.  I don't know why I am there yet.  I am baffled by lingo, unsure of the etiquette and not following things often enough to be really following the conversations.  It took my two weeks to realize that "RT" meant "retweet" and was not some popular tweeter's initials.  And what am I supposed to post?  My life is pretty dull at any particular moment.  Maybe it is more effective for those who use it for business. Sure it's fun to see what people are up to and what is going on locally but maybe I just don't know what to do with the information.  I'm apparently Easily Confused.

The whole hatch-tag thing is still strange to me.  Do people just invent them?  From today in my feed there are tags of #complicated which leads to about 1000 interpretations of complicated.  Going WAY off on a tangent there.  It is obviously important to add #GoodNight so you can wish everyone else who is going to bed "sweet dreams".

I know, there is probably someone out there who does get it and can enlighten me.  Please do!  Using HootSuite is helpful at least at giving it some order.  I'd like to know what your experience is with Twitter and what works best for you.  I'd love this geeky part of my life to click a little better.

2 comments:

  1. Dear Lord, I am NOT the person to instruct you. I hope someone comments here with info I can use. Usually I pop into Twitter about once a week, monitor for half a hour, and if someone says something I can actually understand, I respond to them. Then I run away.

    (I do, however, believe the #thingy is a hashtag. No?)

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  2. No. freaking. clue. I make up hashtags, which probably has everybody who follows me rolling their eyes going "oh Jesus, how embarrassing, what the hell does she think she's doing?". Every now and then I jump on and there are a bunch of people I know and we have a brief silly chat that makes me giggle before bed, which is fun. Most of the time I respond inanely to something someone tweeted nine hours before. And I always forget or am too embarrassed to tweet my blog post links, so it's not like it's increasing my blog traffic either. So yeah, when I said "I will NEVER be on Twitter" I probably should have just stuck with it, but you know I never do that.

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