I spent the last week or so on twitter and being visually minded my first task was to upload and link photos from Pinterest and my blog then to update my profile. I then tweeted, retweeted, made some mistakes, organised my followings and added my avatar.
So, what did I think?
My experience has been one of intrigue followed by a sense of fun that would be easy to turn into obsession. Scrolling through and sorting the promoters from the real deal I found an eclectic assortment of items to read, view, save and comment on.
I had not used the hashtag before and after reading an article by academic danah boyd and discussing twitter with communications students I concluded that I am not alone in this or in not knowing exactly the correct way to use it. There appears to be a tendency not to bother with hashtags and varied often conflicting use of retweeting techniques abound (boyd, Golder and Lotan, 2010). I also found that although twitter is popular and very wide-spread I have yet to find one real person in my life who is using it as most of my immediate circle prefer Instagram. I heard from close family and friends that twitter was considered to be for old people and marketers and no longer cutting-edge !
Not to be distracted from my task I persevered and each day have added new followers from 1 to a 13 people in a week so I considered this a promising start.
My topics were colour and design so I added the # tag to Colour, colour design, colour in web design and I also looked for technology, #web design, #new media, #writing, #creativity and #art. Although I observed that many posts I read I had seen via blog feeds or were redirected from Pinterest and facebook. I came across quite unique charity drives such as ‘own your own colour’ for UNICEF .
Tickled Pink #own a colour# a fun way to promote a great worthy cause http://www.ownacolour.com/share/f91e9d
I have kept fairly minimal in my #tags and retweets usually by just adding a few words and deleting unnecessary text. I am according to danah boyd fairly typical of a twitter user in that I often retweet to amplify or spread tweets to new audiences, to make my presence as a listener visible, to publicly agree with someone or to validate by drawing attention to an article. Also I may retweet to save a tweet, to support someone or purely for self gain to find followers (boyd, Golder and Lotan, 2010). An example of highlighting a favourite blog or supporting someone else is this tweet for Design Seeds.
Another design seed# colourscheme # to adapt to web designcolours # http://design-seeds.com/index.php/home/entry/summer-citrus
My conclusion is that it is a fun way to keep up to date quickly on topics that are of interest, an opportunity to comment on just about anything and a fabulous way to while away time if you need to and be engrossed in uncovering new interests. Even without personally knowing my followers there is a definite sense of shared value and engagement. A feeling develops of wanting to keep people in the loop to highlight what you are uncovering. The nature of the tweets being so short is, that the topic stands alone and does not require much input which is an added advantage and helps to make it fast and diverse in nature. Since linking twitter to my blog along with other social media platforms I have had 800 hits to Tickled Pink over the last month, so the value speaks for itself.
Join me in my next post as I uncover from the experts some great tips on tweeting. Cheers Diyu |  |  |  |  |
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