Why I Like Twitter

AKA Follow Me, Unfollow Me, It's All Okay

I’m sure you’ve heard a lot out about Twitter. It’s an online social networking website where you sign up for an account, and then say what you want to say in 140 characters or less.

For flash fiction writers, that may be heaven and a 150k word novelist might consider it hell.
Regardless, coherently getting across your thoughts in only 140 characters can take some practice, but good writers should be efficient with their words.

When I first got a Twitter account, I poked around for about a day and then deleted it. If you don’t have someone to follow, it’s like walking into a party full of people you don’t know having conversations you don’t understand. Being the introvert I am, I was bored and left.

The next time I got a Twitter account a few months later, I knew some people to follow. Then I looked at who they followed, and followed some more people. I didn’t say much to begin with, still don’t say a whole lot, but I have found value in the Twitter experience.

For me, Twitter adds three things to my life:

• relevant URLs – I follow a lot of authors and agents, and the URLs they tweet are on topics of great interest to me
• another way to chat – I have several IM (instant messenger) accounts in order to chat with different people, so one more makes it that much easier to connect with my friends, both with tweets and direct messages through the Twitter system
• fun – whether it’s the tweet itself, or the picture, or the link to a webpage, I get a bit of fun every day from the information that’s streaming across the little spots of the Twitterverse I pay attention to

There are lots of tools and tips about ways to tweet on Twitter, so find something you like to use that also fits into your life. I have a little pay-by-the-minute phone, so I only tweet from a computer. I like TweetDeck because I can create columns of different people I’m following, so friends are separate from industry professionals. You can also just use your personal Home page after you log in to catch-up on everyone you are following.

winged words

If you’d like to see how a few of the folks I follow use Twitter, here are links to Neil Gaiman, Rachel Caine, Nathan Fillion, Candy Havens, Whil Wheaton, Bob Mayer, The Knight Agency and Your_Novel.

You are welcome to follow me (heidi2524), or just check out all of the people I follow. And if you unfollow me later, no hard feelings, I understand. Twitter isn’t for everyone; I just wanted to let you know if you came to the party, you can come sit by me.

“Man. The boyfriend fled the living room while Jane Austen was on and hid in my office. Now all my computer stuff is upgraded. Sigh.”
- RichelleMead, Thu Jun 20:53 via web”

Jul 16, 2009

Tags: twitter

Categories: social networking