Confessions of a Twitter Failure
06/04/14 05:34 PM
I’m illtwitterate. I have a Twitter account that I post on several times a week, but I follow more people than follow me, and I don’t really have a connection to a lot of them. As a result, I’m forever drowning in tweets that I can’t relate to. It’s like a constant stream of self-conscious minutiae, mixed in with advertising. I have trouble separating the wheat from the chaff, so I never do what every “branding expert” has advised me to do, which is engage my fellow tweeters. It’s not that I don’t want to engage them. It’s that they’re too difficult to pinpoint among what I like to refer to as—twitter litter.
I’m not bashing Twitter. I think it’s great if you know how to use it—and therein lies my problem. As I said right upfront—I’m illtwitterate.
Don’t get me wrong. I know how to tweet. I can attach photos and links with the best of them. I used to write Twitter leads for nightly news stories when I worked in news.
Although, now that I think about it, I don’t use hash tags even though I know I should. And I never really got a grasp on @. Navigating Twitter’s sea of information is drowning me. There must be a Twitter for Dummies book out there. It just never occurred to me that I needed one until now. And like all the other “for Dummies” books I’ve read, I’ll probably get halfway through it and say, “I know all this.” Unfortunately (for me), the pearls of wisdom I’m seeking will most likely be buried in the second half of the book—which I’ll never get around to reading. Maybe that’s a telling sign. Maybe I need to embrace Twitter completely before I get it. Even better, Maybe there’s someone out there who can teach me how to navigate Twitter—in 140 characters or less.