I'm thinking back to high school when a lot of people used Twitter. But I remember people using it in order to call people out on things (read as: HIGH SCHOOL DRAMA), but they would use it without mentioning the person they were talking about. They would simply tweet about it, and hope that someone would pick up on what they were saying in order to gain attention and create drama. I think I used it to just vent in 140 characters, probably about how annoying my parents were or the fact that I had to go to a trombone lesson that I did not want to go to. But that was it. I didn't really know anyone that would constantly check Twitter like they would on Facebook.
Now when I scroll through Twitter, it just makes me want to go back to my home screen. I just opened up the app right now and the first thing I see is an ad for a Land Rover, and then right underneath it, it says: 'While you were away…'. That's Twitter's lame way of keeping me up to date on the things that I apparently never scrolled down to see and were posted days ago. I keep scrolling to find some high school friends that still use Twitter for stating sarcastic comments or complaining about school work. Oh and then? A 'You might like..' section that shows tweets of people that I don't follow, but they show up anyways because people that I follow have liked their tweets. OK… I just feel lost and the connections are no longer there. The rest is just filled with tweets from musicians that I follow that are promoting their music and are thanking their fans for a great show (that shows a personal choice of people that I follow). Do you see what I'm getting at here? I don't feel like I am getting anything out of the app. The interface has roughly stayed the same and hasn't morphed into anything modern, and it is just overly cluttered with people who are trying to promote their personal brand and gain followers through pointless hashtags. I don't feel like I am in a personable community. Rather I am in a community of businesses.
But I can't write this article without saying one good thing about Twitter. I think that if you have a plan of action, then you can use the platform to your advantage. If you have a plan of getting the attention of a certain celebrity or want to interact with a mogul, you definitely have the opportunity to do that. There is actually an app that Twitter has created called TweetDeck.
You can have your computer screen filled with columns of your profile, your feed, the activity of your followers, your private messages, etc. If you closely follow that column that shows the activity of your followers, then you can see when that person you want to interact with is online and is 'favoriting' or retweeting certain tweets. That is your time to jump in on the action, and tweet at that person, because odds are you will probably get noticed. Creepy? Maybe. Effective? Yes.
Just another article in my series of: Social Media Setbacks
