How Do I Utilize Twitter?

I don't remember why I bothered making a Twitter profile in the first place.

I probably just considered it my duty as an anthropologist to see what all the fuss was about. Looking back at my timeline, it seems to have amused me for a couple of months, but then I forgot about it until February of this year.

At that point, I noticed that my friend Kristen, author of Crazy World, Amazing Life, had a Twitter feed on her blog, and I thought it was sort of a cool feature. I initially thought it would be handy for posting a quote-of-the-day sort of thing on my blog, since my husband had just suggested periodically changing the quote at the top of the page, and I am sort of lazy. Very quickly, though, I noticed that most of the quotes I wanted to post were over 140 characters, especially if I wanted to actually include an attribution, so they turned into status updates instead.

I'm still a little unclear on the distinction- in terms of either form or content- between a tweet and a Facebook status update, besides length. If I were separating my personal observations from my professional ones, as some people do (see below), then it might make sense to post the former on Facebook and the latter on Twitter. So far, however, my tweets, like this blog, are intended to be a personal record as well as an academic exercise or a pile of work and SAR stories. One friend cross-posts everything, but that seems redundant, and I feel that if I'm going to bother having a profile in both places, I should do something different with Twitter. But how, and what?

One thing I have figured out about Twitter is that Sturgeon's Law (95% of everything is crap) definitely applies. My husband has been very critical of Twitter for as long as I have known him, which may have contributed somewhat to the gap in my usage pattern, and I have to concede that he is correct about most of its content; as with most things (and this is doubly true of teenager-dominated social media), the lowest common denominator tends to dominate, which means that the spelling, grammar, and punctuation are practically nonexistent, which means that a lot of it is, frankly, kind of hard to read at all. What is legible seems to be mostly vacuous pop-culture clutter.

Still, if you can find a chunk of the remaining 5% that is of interest, the thing has its uses.

In terms of "social networking," I follow only a couple of my actual friends on Twitter, and I honestly don't rely on it that heavily for keeping up with either of them. One cross-posts her tweets to her Facebook status, and her blog shows up in my Blogger feed; the other is more active on Facebook than Twitter and also has a blog that shows up in my Blogger feed. Facebook really offers a better platform than Twitter for actual interaction between friends; it's more interactive and offers more depths and more breadth than just bouncing 140-character messages back and forth in a thread that is difficult for mutual friends to follow, much less jump in on. Interactions on Twitter are like open-air instant messaging, and I don't find them all that useful for communicating with friends. So, if Twitter is a social networking tool, it's not, at least in my experience, a tool for socializing with your own personal friend network.

How do I use Twitter?

As a writer, I follow a daily writing prompt feed but I honestly don't pay much attention to it half the time, though I probably should; I follow a few fellow-writers and a couple of writers' groups, and I follow the Blogger account just in case I miss something useful on the Dashboard, because I tend to miss things in my haste to make an overdue catchup post from time to time.

I follow the Twitter feeds of a couple of my favorite authors and a couple of my favorite webcomic artists, partially for updates on their work, but mostly because I enjoy their commentary as sort of a mini-snippet of their writing, of which I am a fan, so free samples are nice, and they also often point out interesting things elsewhere on the internet.

I could connect to fan pages for any of the above on Facebook, but I find that most Facebook fan pages don't update as frequently with the same eclectic sort of content; I also find that when I sign onto Facebook, I'm interested in what my friends are saying, doing, and sharing, and I find news from some third party to be intrusive and annoying, which is why I have all the pages I have "liked" blocked from my news feed. On Twitter, by comparison, random news, comments, and information from and about other sources is what I'm actually looking for.

I also follow severral users whose tweets are primarily about areas of academic or professional interest to me. Most of these tweets take the form of links accompanied by a brief summary or comment, sometimes a link to the user's own blog to announce an update, often a link to a news story, academic article, post on someone else's blog, or another page with relevant resources.

It is interesting that these individuals are all total strangers to me; I follow their tweets out of interest in the information and commentary they have to share, and honestly but to a lesser extent in the hope that someone in my field will, in return, notice something I have to say, not out of a desire to connect with them on a personal level. Being part of their Twitter audience is entirely appropriate, just as sharing their tweets with a professional-interested audience of mostly strangers is entirely appropriate for and expected of them, but I would consider it inappropriate and presumptuous to send them a friend request on Facebook, because such an action would imply a more personal connection. It's the digital equivalent of the difference between listening to someone's lectures and reading their articles, and staking out their house hoping for a dinner invite. Twitter is useful in this sense because, while many people post a mixture of professional and personal items on Twitter, the connections themselves are less tied to personal identity than friend connections on Facebook. Facebook is about connecting with people; Twitter is about exchanging words and ideas, and the personal interaction component of that is less important.

I seem to have a handle on how to effectively consume information from Twitter, but my goal for Twitter, for my blogs, and for my writing aspirations in general is to be not just a consumer but a producer of interesting ideas, good stories, and clever comments, or at least the source of an interesting link or two. The question, then, is how to effectively use Twitter in more than a passive way- how do I say things, share things, create things?