Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Getting Up to Speed on Twitter

by Pa Rock
Citizen Tweeter

While I have been a Twitter user for nearly nine years now, I will readily admit that I am far from proficient in using the social media platform to its fullest advantage.  During an average day I will post a couple of original tweets that bear my opinion on various subjects, and I will retweet the thoughts of others that strike me as being of particular interest - often adding my own churlish comments to the original message.  I have learned what a hashtag is, and will occasionally attach one or two to a particular thought that I want to spread to a wider audience.

Sometime a couple of years ago Twitter made a fundamental change, and I guess that I either didn't get the memo or neglected to read it.  It used to be that when I tweeted something and someone else did me the honor of retweeting it, Twitter would send a notice into my Twitter feed announcing the retweet.  But then that stopped, and as the months wore on with no retweets, I began to suspect the worst:  that I was no longer funny - or interesting - or worth repeating.  The same was true with "likes."  No one seemed to be "hearting" my pithy little statements like they once had.

I also started noticing that when I sent a direct message to someone over Twitter that I no longer received replies.  Oh well, their loss I suppose.

Then this week, during a siege of malaise, I began exploring the Twitter homepage just to see how much I didn't know - and it turns out the answer was "plenty."    I found a tab that said "notifications," and learned, after clicking on it, that I actually was being retweeted - now and then - and even "hearted" - and those "notifications" were being filed away under their special tab. 

And then there was the "messages" tab, where people had been trying to contact me directly, and I had been inadvertently ignoring them.  (One message that could have been quite costly involved a property that I had recently sold.)

So now I am more up-to-speed with Twitter than I have been in some time, and I am pumped to know that some of what I actually spew into that system gets read and even appreciated on the rare occasion.  I know I'll never be as great as Donald John Trump when it comes to mastering Twitter, but, on the upside, I will also probably never weigh three hundred pounds or be blackmailed by Russians!

I feel my snarky mood coming on.  I guess it's time to hit the Twitter!

1 comment:

Xobekim said...

We should see if we could get "hash tag pound sign" to trend. But how to do it? ## or #PoundSign?