How to Twitter

MARCH 13, 2009

How to Twitter
The social rules and tips for gaining 'followers'; why opinionated people win

By JULIA ANGWIN
WSJ


When I first joined Twitter, I felt like I was in a noisy bar where everyone was shouting and nobody was listening. Soon, I began to decode its many mysteries: how to find a flock of followers, how to talk to them in a medium that blasts to lots of people at once and how to be witty in very tiny doses. Twitter is a mass text-messaging service that allows you to send short 140-character updates -- or "tweets" -- to a bunch of people at once. They are your "followers." It was designed to be read on a cellphone, though many people read it online, too.

Suddenly a lot of non-tweeters are starting to feel left out. On "The Daily Show" this week, host Jon Stewart reported on Twitter with a wink (or was it a twink?) at the narcissism of the personal broadcasting system. It has a world-wide audience of six million unique visitors a month, up from 1.2 million a year ago, according to ComScore Media Metrix. But I have to admit I didn't understand the appeal of Twitter when I joined, at the prodding of friends, in November. One answer that explains its popularity: It's not about chatting with your friends -- it's about promoting yourself.

(snip)

I had to learn the crucial distinction between a "follower" and a "friend." On Facebook, if I'm your friend, you're my friend, and we can read all about each other. Relationships on Twitter are not reciprocal: People you follow do not have to follow you or give you permission to follow them. You just sign up and start following them. It's a bit like stalking. Heather Gold, a comedian and Twitter devotee, points out that for all its flaws, the term follower "is more honest than friend." At first, I was the loneliest of social creatures -- a leader without followers. I tried searching for my actual real-world friends using Twitter's "Find People" function, but it was down the day I joined. (Twitter is growing so fast that short outages are not unusual.)

(snip)

I discovered that a better way to get followers was to tweet. Every time I tweeted, I got a surge of followers. Where were they coming from? The likely answer illuminates Twitter's greatest strength: It's easily searchable... I quickly found that my general musings about life such as -- "thank god they have wifi on jury duty" -- fell like a dead weight, eliciting no response. A larger problem was that it was hard to tweet when I didn't know whom I was tweeting to. Unlike Facebook, where I know each and every one of my 287 friends, I have never met or heard of the majority of the 221 people following me on Twitter.

(snip)

I spent a surprising amount of time trying out tweets in my head before tweeting. I aimed to tweet once a day, but often came up short. I found it difficult to fit in both news and opinion. Without a point of view, though, my updates were pretty boring. So, for instance, I changed "eating strawberries during a snowstorm." Into "eating strawberries during a snowstorm. not carbon efficient but lovely."

(snip)



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638550095558381.html (subscription)

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W3

A way to get followers?!!?

I'm in!!!

Now how do I use it...

instead of a service one that drives 70% of our economy, would twitting and YouTube and the View and all the other shows would be so popular? If one watches CNN or MSNBC, they twit, they blog, they hosts other bloggers, they provide clips from other shows.. who cares?

Yesterday I caught Arianna Huffington on Blitzer, declaring that she gave Obama an F in the economy. BFD. Who cares what Huffington is thinking about Obama?

Key phrases:

....serves the needs of high-attention individuals

....that the details of one's life matter to an audience

....free to attack anyone lower down the ranks

....the ability to unleash a direct marketing business the likes of which the world has never seen"

....low-level celebrity for the chattering class

....pathologies of celebrity

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/07/twitter-is-a-suckers-game

That he is grieving for not being A List

So the people who read that paper are basically in charge of our economy and they can't figure out how to "twitter"? No wonder we are in the shitter.

Frankly, I hope that our leaders have better things to worry about and to do than to twit: oh, I am so bored. Or, like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland: I am late, I am late.

I read this paper, I don't know and don't care about twitting, and I certainly am not in charge of our economy.

on how to use stupid messaging software then yeah they are too fucking dumb to be in the position they are in. Did you not notice what they did to the economy?

Leave it to the Brits to present thing to their illogical conclusion.