Life After Twitter

I swore you wouldn’t catch me dead using Twitter.

That was for people with No Life and No Relationships.

It was a tool to communicate with people you would likely never meet. It was a waste of Time. You had to be a Loser to use Twitter. The whole social marketing was nothing but buzzwords and not something that I as a 50 something woman needed to Squander my time doing or even cared to embrace.

That was how I felt in mid-January 2010.

My Life After Twitter began on January 17, 2010. Twitter awakened me to the power of social networking. I had no idea what it was capable of delivering. I am a Twitter Convert. But I haven’t embraced Facebook….yet.

I was converted to Twitter by a computer geek’s bored wife – a bored wife who was amazing at setting up Twitter accounts. I was told that if I was serious about a travel blog then I needed to get serious about Twitter. This woman got me going with hundreds of followers in just days. Now I’m hoping to hit 2000 followers by early June.

Here is what Twitter has taught me:

• There are real people behind each twitter address. With time and effort personalities shine.
• Great blog articles and fascinating info is tweeted nonstop. A twitter platform like Tweetdeck allows you to monitor what’s going on and break down the tweets into your areas of interest – for example travel, wine, adventure or health.  Unfortunately it’s addictive.
• You can find about what is happening in the world faster than through traditional news sources.
• You can, as I did last Saturday, catch a chance remark on Twitter, and end up meeting the real person a few hours later. I met Jeannie Mark of Nomadic Chick fame at Vancouver’s Outdoor Adventure and Travel Show. We had a great discussion, especially since we share a passion for travel and blogging. But, Jeannie is way ahead of me in using Twitter. She has learned the art of a Twitter conversation and I’m not quite there yet. She was also smart enough to contact a well known travel writer via Twitter for an interview. Not only did she get the interview she got a free media pass to the show. Brilliant!
• It’s a great way to promote one’s blog and an extremely interesting lesson on what people in cyberspace find worthwhile reading. A blog you think should be successful often isn’t and vice versa.
• Participating on Twitter mimics the real world – what goes around comes around. If you’re supportive of people they return the support but it’s not instantaneous.
• You can find out (in my opinion) who has a disproportionably large ego or sense of self importance by checking out how many people they follow in relation to their followers. Bill Gates can get away with it – not so sure about too many others.
• You can pose questions and get timely answers.

There are a few things I don’t like about twitter.

• Some of the tweets are completely inane – just like some conversations in real life.
• It can take up a huge amount of your time if you allow it to happen.
• I have to constantly defend twitter. Non users don’t get it.

Never say never is what I have learned. Maybe Facebook is next.

Leigh McAdam

HikeBikeTravel

Photo credit: Iphone

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