Twitter Twatter

           I got the chance to read and learn a lot about Twitter this week. I am not a very active Twitter user, so to learn about it from a professional perspective was interesting. One of the interesting and smart ways of looking at Twitter is to consider it as microblogging. A blog post and a Twitter post are similar in that you choose a topic and write about it and then try to promote it to other people. With a tweet, it is a little harder because there is a character limit. Therefore, tweets will usually point your audience towards a blog post, video, image, or etc. It is like the tweet is helping promote the blog or whichever media is being presented and it is summarizing it or making it look interesting so your followers will click on it to continue finding out more.

            Jason McDonald, author of the workbook, gives us three reasons as to why Twitter is unique compared to other social media platforms. These reasons include: anyone can set up an account (no authentication), anyone can look at other people’s posts (no friending is required), and anyone can send anyone a message on Twitter without having to follow one another. He refers to Twitter as being “open”.

            Twitter is all about the hashtags. Usually, I am not one to put hashtags anywhere. I think they are dumb, and I know that when I personally encounter one, I don’t tend to read it. However, it is very appropriate to use hashtags on Twitter. The hashtags are used to indicate keywords to your audience or followers. You never use spaces in a hashtag. If you want to highlight something important in your tweet or have your tweet linked to something else, use a hashtag.

            I learned this in an earlier chapter of this workbook, but it has to do with Twitter. When it comes to handles and you using them in a tweet, there are ways to type them, depending on who you wish to see your tweet. If you use someone’s handle in a tweet and you put the whole handle the exact way it is (for example my handle on Twitter is @RachelKimmel7), then I would be able to see this tweet, your followers would be able to see this tweet, and my followers would be able to see this tweet. If you put a period in front of the handle (.@RachelKimmel7), then only your followers would be able to see this tweet. This is important because if you want to tweet something and not have the person you tweet about see your tweet, then you need to put a period in front of their handle. This is useful because you might have something not so nice to say, but you want your followers to know you are not just talking openly about maybe one of them. This way, they know who you are talking about, but the person you have mentioned does not necessarily know.