Social media and me, Part II: What I've learned so far about Twitter

Earlier this month, I wrote about why I was feeling so positive about my first brushes with Twitter. It was new to me, and I was just beginning to learn the ropes. At around the same time I wrote that, my 7-year-old learned to ride a two-wheeler, and I feel a little bit like she looked that day she finally stopped wobbling and soared down the lane. I have that “Okay, I get this now, I understand how to do it and I’m soaring!” feeling.

I joined Twitter a little uncertainly, not so sure I’d be welcome at the social media party. After all, I’m one of the last Facebook holdouts in my generation. In my mind, prior to late summer, Twitter was in the same category. I joined it because my agent suggested that I do so, but at first I didn’t feel like I was gaining much traction. I found lots of people whom I wanted to follow; I just wasn’t finding many followers of my own. “My friends aren’t really using Twitter,” I said, making excuses for my low numbers. “It’s not a soccer-mom trend yet.” But as my agent, who served as my Twitter guru in those early days, pointed out, it wasn’t my friends I wanted as followers; it was people I didn’t already know.

And gradually, with her help, I caught on as to how to find them. When people I was already following mentioned names in their Tweets, I looked up those names and usually clicked on “Follow.” Those names led to more names, and so on. Then I figured out how to search profiles for keywords. I thought about the topics that most interested me: parenting, writing, running. But that’s going to bring up like a million people, if I search on those three terms, I worried. I came up with an idea: search on writer plus runner plus the name of one state at a time. Find a writer/runner in Massachusetts, in Maine, in South Carolina, in Kansas, in Montana. I tried that, and it worked really well. In most cases, only a single page of names of people who identified themselves as both writers and runners came up for each state. And by not including “parent” in my search terms, even though that’s one of the topics I like to read about, I found a wider scope of people: an Episcopal minister in Massachusetts, a sorority girl in South Carolina, a grandmother out west, a middle-aged male CEO in the mid-Atlantic region.

Soon I was reading a lot about writing and a lot about running, which continue to be two topics of great interest to me. But I like knowing that these are only two of the hundreds or thousands of topical subgroups available to me. One day I searched on Unitarianism, my religion. Another day I searched on “mindful living,” a life practice important to me. But I could also choose words not connected to me, like “surfing” or “beekeeping,” and read about people I don’t necessarily have much in common with at all, and it would probably be just as interesting. I like finding out what other people are doing, just as the cornerstone Twitter question asks, but also what they are cooking for dinner, where they go running, what they are reading, how the weather is wherever they are. No one can be boring in just 140 characters.

And it’s not just chitchat; Twitterers use posts to point out valuable information, how-to articles, interesting blogs. Some of it is like small talk around the water cooler, but the links make all the difference. A co-worker from another part of the building might tell you about the soup she made for dinner, but seldom does she hand you a just-published article about the craft of fiction, say, or how to train for a half-marathon.

Moreover, this week I used Twitter to find an old friend I hadn’t spoken with in 15 years. She has her own website; I could have just as easily found her through Google earlier. But somehow the rapid-fire nature of Tweets made it easier to reach out. I didn’t have to cover the last 15 years; no one would expect that in 140 characters. I just had to say “Hi, how are you, glad I found you here, let’s get back in touch!” Ultimately, I do want to know more about what’s happened to her over the past decade and a half than she’ll be able to fit into 140-character bursts, but it helped me break the ice, knowing there was no pressure to write a long explanatory letter. Through Twitter, just a quick hello is all the eloquence you need.

So it’s really good to be here, and to keep learning. I’m glad my agent encouraged me, and I’m grateful to everyone I’ve connected with so far. It’s not like riding a bike in most ways. It’s not good exercise, for example. But as with my daughter learning to ride her bike earlier this month, it’s a skill that I’m excited to have mastered, and am eager to work on further. I’m soaring.