To Kill a Mocking Sparrow ~ How to Use Twitter ?
Twitter is among those things which
appear to be frivolous at first but which are in fact a treasure trove of a
value add. A surprising majority of us are blissfully unaware of how Twitter
works including many who are present on Twitter!
To begin with, Twitter is no
Facebook. There is a sea of a difference. If FB is a friendly neighbourhood in
a small town, Twitter is an upmarket gated community in a Metropolitan city. The
element of personal attachment is lesser when it comes to the people who you
come in to contact with on Twitter. It is more a group of people who share
their views on various topics of mutual interests on Twitter whereas on FB, it
is a group of friends indulging in random chit chat.
Twitter works like this – You ‘tweet’
something and it appears on your timeline. The beauty of it is that your posts can be a maximum of 140 characters long(just got changed to 280 characters on 27th of September, 2017) and not a syllable more. People who ‘Follow’ you can see what
you tweet or
post. So if you keep on tweeting mundane details of your day to
day life, very soon your ‘followers’ will start ‘unfollow’-ing you. Only
celebrities can afford to do that on the pretext of sharing their personal
lives with their fans and thereby becoming closer to them! As mango people or
as people who has no celebrity status attached to us, we should use twitter to
obtain and disseminate information that interests us. Only this will want people to ‘follow’ you.
Tweeting “Woke up to a sleepy morning” is of no use to any one but Tweeting “Went
to bed late reading ‘A song of ice and fire’. A must read!” is acceptable. The
idea is to write something which is of use to the person reading your tweet.
Speaking of followers, there are
celebrities who have millions of followers. Mr.Bachchan has over 9 Mn followers
and Katy Perry has the highest number of followers at 54Mn. People like you and
I will have hardly 100s of followers. Learning who all to follow in twitter is
of prime importance. The idea is to follow those ‘handles’ which will tweet
ideas/posts which is of interest and is informative to you. Mostly only celebrities
make financial gains from twitter. So don’t get in to the business of getting
more followers. It is near to futile.
Now, some technicalities of how to
use a twitter account. Your username is your twitter handle. Try to make it
interesting. You can use ‘@’ to bring a person’s attention to your tweet. If
you want to bring the attention of say, Shahrukh Khan to your tweet, you may
use @iamsrk “Your message in 140 characters or less”. Hashtags are used to indicate
a common thread or topic of discussion. For instance, #Indiabudget or
#Newyearseve. If more and more people start using the same hashtag, it starts’
trending’.
If a person ‘Retweets’ your tweet, then
your tweet is visible to that person’s followers. It is the e-version of word
of mouth publicity. There is an option to ‘favourite’ a tweet also where in
only you will come to know that another person has liked your tweet. Then there
is the question of how to know if the person you are following is a genuine
profile or not. Watch out for a blue tick mark along with the twitter handle of
that person. The presence of blue tick mark indicates a verified profile and it
is the real person be it Barkhadutt or Shashi Tharoor.Although twitter is all about public conversations, there is an option to have a private conversation too. There is a 'DM' or a Direct Message option. But this works only if the person you want to talk to 'follow's you.
One should know how self indulgent
one should be on twitter. The key is to package information in a way that is
appealing yet not preachy. If you select the people you want to follow astutely, twitter can be an incessant source of intelligent conversations that you can be part of.
Arun
Babu
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