A-Twitter

I have been on Twitter since February 6th. It’s been around since 2006, so that seemed like the right amount of lead time.

Seriously, from the start I thought Twitter sounded really stupid, and had no intention of ever getting on it. I was brought to it by the TV show Grimm.

As I would read posts in the Television Without Pity Forum, a lot of people would post things from Twitter, mainly from David Giuntoli (Nick), Sasha Roiz (Renard), and Reggie Lee (Wu). The posts were interesting and funny, and the show didn’t really seem to have a strong presence on Facebook, which is where I usually follow stuff that I like, so I finally decided to sign up.

Initially, I thought I would just follow the people from the show, because that’s why I was over there, but they keep prompting you for more until you have at least 14, I think, and then they want you to make a post. What had I had gotten myself into?

I have adjusted somewhat. First of all, I did end up finding other things I was interested in, and while the interplay between the Grimm cast is fun, I think maybe where Twitter has been most useful for me is in following the bands I want to see and my favorite political writers. Not everyone is Facebook. A lot of musicians have a strong MySpace presence, but MySpace bugs me in a way that Twitter does not.

So, sure, I have these exotic travel goals, but at the same time I could just decide that if the Gin Blossoms still aren’t coming to Portland, maybe I will just go see them in Indiana or something. At least I am getting updates.

For the political, I love Joe Conason (The National Memo), but the Oregonian hardly ever runs his work, and he posts good stuff, so following him works well for me. Krugman, Kristof, and Pitts are pretty good for posting their own columns on Facebook, but Krugman and Kristof also post a lot of interesting other things on Twitter. I had to un-follow David Sirota—he just tweets too much. I follow a few who will go through phases where you get twenty tweets in a few hours, but not all the time.

Ultimately, it seems like Twitter works better for people with public personas, while Facebook works better with friends. I don’t have a problem with that, so I am finding something useful in a new (for me) aspect of social networking. There have been a few issues. One is my username, sultryglebe.

Actually, it comes from an old hymn, The Lord My Pasture Will Prepare. We sang it in church, and the phrase stuck out to me, and I decided that the next time I needed a username, that was it. (Incidentally, a glebe is a cultivated plot of land, often owned by the church. I had assumed it was something more boggy, but that’s what dictionaries are for.)

I would occasionally attract new followers who, based on profile pictures and linked URLs, may have thought that the “sultry” part was saying something about me that it really wasn’t. That felt awkward, and then they would un-follow me a few days later, which felt kind of bad. I had not originally intended to accumulate followers, but then when I did I didn’t want to disappoint them.

I didn’t originally even intend to post that much, but then I felt like I should be doing something with it. So I would make posts, and then do I use the same thing for my Facebook status update? Okay, you can have that automatically post to Facebook, but then if you are doing something with the hash tags (I have participated in a couple of contests) it looks weird, but it still posts automatically because that’s your setting.

I was kind of thinking to just not post anything or be followed, and only use it for following, but then sometimes I can’t resist. Also, because I have been thinking about self-promotion as I work toward becoming a professional writer, as opposed to amateur, well, that would be a public persona. Could Twitter be helpful there?

Anyway, I’m trying something new. First of all, I have unlinked Facebook and Twitter. This is mainly because I am starting to put my blog posts on Twitter, and they already get posted on Facebook via Networked Blogs. With the URL, I will do a hash tag of the relevant topic, mainly after checking to see if it is relevant.
I guess the goal is to increase my blog readership, but it’s okay if it doesn’t.

Maybe my real goal is just to see if this is something that works, and then I will know something that I didn’t before. See, now I don’t just learn things by reading—I also conduct experiments! (I will be using Google Analytics to see page hits and referral sites, to see if anyone is linking from Twitter.)

And maybe I do want to attract more readers. I do feel that I have something to say.

I don’t know if I will do this with every single blog post yet, or how long I will do it. It’s kind of a work in progress, much like me.