Demystifying Twitter

It’s About Time to Start Demystifying Twitter, er, X

What can Twitter (I refuse to call it X) do for you, the independent writer? Let’s look at demystifying Twitter in all its glory.

Demystifying Twitter: What’s the Big Deal About 140 280 Characters?

Twitter is essentially a microblogging service. You broadcast your thoughts to the ether. Some of those thoughts, to be sure, are more interesting than others.

Many of us know someone who tweets about everything in their lives. It’s dull, it’s dumb, and you want to throttle them half the time. Their cheesecake is not fascinating. Their slow bus to downtown is not riveting. You don’t much care why they didn’t buy a particular pair of sneakers.

We may also know someone who’s a lot more fascinating. I’m not talking about celebrities, who have other sources for their cachet. Instead, I am talking about people who just seem to be more interesting, or at least their tweets are. Or at least they are funny or relevant.

Guess which one you want to be like?

Two Lives

On much of social media, when you are an independent author, you lead two lives. There is your personal life where you have friends and family, but there is also your professional or semi-professional life. Even if you never sell (or never want to) a syllable of your work, if you want to improve, you’re at least in the realm of semi-professional.

Demystifying Twitter: Two Twitter Accounts?

That might not be such a bad idea. One for yourself, for your political opinions, your questions about the universe, your tweets to customer service when something goes wrong …

The other? For writing. This can be for talking about what you’re doing, and even teasing it a bit. For reporting your NaNoWriMo progress, if you like, to your cheering section. Also, for the hashtags #amwriting and #amediting, too.

Demystifying Twitter: A Little More About Hashtags

Engagement is the name of the game on a microblogging social media platform like Twitter. You want to, you know, actually tweet with people. Soooo…. what do you do? Well, if you start following hashtags you like, then you will start to see the content that you like.

And that means your stream will be more fun, more inspiring, and more of what you want. Pretty cool, huh?

There is more, of course. I’ll get to it soon. So stay tuned!