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Saturday 9 July 2011

The evolution of a twitterer (aka tweeter or tweep)


  1. You come across the word Twitter in some blogs you have started reading.
  2. You hear that Twitter is a site where everyone publishes what they eat for breakfast or where they are sitting at the moment.
  3. You decide - no, that's not for me.
  4. You catch sight of the word Twitter again mentioned by the people you respect. You start wavering.
  5. You go to the website and register.
  6. You discover that you are totally at a loss about what to do next.
  7. You read Help and calm down, now you know what to do.
  8. You spend 3 hours on creating a fancy background for your Twitter page.
  9. You are puzzled by the #s and @s and different abbreviations - a totally alien coded language - people are using and get determined to find out what everything means.
  10. You learn that you can follow the people who you know from your professional field.
  11. You start clicking frantically on Follow.
  12. You discover that you are following 200 people while 10 are following you back. You get a little sour.
  13. You rack your brains about what you could post.
  14. You read the witty, facetious and loaded messages others are posting and realize that you with your English being the third language you've mastered cannot be eligible to the title of everybody's all-time-favourite tweeter.
  15. You decide to focus on posting useful links from the sites and pages that you keep finding on the web.
  16. The tactic works, people who share your professional interests start following you back.
  17. You are overwhelmed with joy and gratitude.
  18. You are thrilled to see your first mention or a retweet.
  19. You learn that you can acknowledge your favourite tweeters with Follow Friday sign #FF. The first time you are hurt when you follow-friday an army of people and get 3 #FFs back.
  20. You spend hours surfing the web to find more and more new pages to share on Twitter. The number of your tweets per day rockets.
  21. You discover that retweeting the posts of very popular sites is pointless, everyone has already tweeted / seen them. You don't get any response.
  22. You are hurt when you see that the same links you have posted are ignored but are retweeted if posted by popular, fave people.
  23. You are hurt and stop retweeting blog posts from people who never ever say thanks to you for popularizing their blogs.
  24. You go to the You follow list and unfollow the users who do not post anything of interest to you or who have come into your list by plain chance.
  25. The next day you see that the number of your followers has decreased considerably. (Because of your unfollow? So you ask yourself - WHY were they following me?)
  26. You have established a tiny group of people who actually TALK to you sometimes. You want to hug them every time they write something for you personally.
  27. You have realized that Twitter is an endless stream of bits and pieces of useful information which you can use for your development - professional and personal, and you are content and happy that you are a twitterer.
     

6 comments:

popps said...

28. Chris,a luddite, writes to you to try to make you see sense and give up Twitter.

Baiba said...

Fine, just tell me why...

Elina said...

That was funny, though i haven't yet even once checked the famous Twitter.... must be the only one. :)

seburnt said...

A lot of this is what I experienced the first while I was on Twitter too, but persistence and understanding of how to best utilise it for PD and networking is key - like with any web tool really. Don't give up too easily as it is invaluable if used for a purpose!

I do tend to retweet only PLN blog posts (like yours!) or key links I find interesting or even local. You're right in that many are RTed to the point of futility. =)

@seburnt

@CeciELT said...

Loved the progression and how it resonated with my own experience :-)

I'm glad you're part of the ones I actually TALK and interact with, Baiba!

Thanks for putting a smile on my face early in the morning! Have a great week!

@inglishteacher said...

Hi Baiba

Really loved this blog post - and so much you say is true - I hadn't realised what #FF was for - but I do now :)

Richard