Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The Twitter
Don’t laugh . . . I don’t think I owned a cell phone until 2004.
Since this blog is my auxiliary memory, I’m going to catalog useful Twitter links in this post. Feel free to add useful links in the comments, and if you want to “follow” me (isn’t that what the kids say? I don’t know. Perhaps I shouldn’t have chased them off my lawn), I’m dshoffman. That’s what I’ve decided to use as a by-line, too: D. S. Hoffman. Sex-neutral, so I can pub the romance!
On second thought, maybe I don’t want that romance traceable back to me.
How to find the best Twitter hashtags (includes link to “how to use hashtags“).
Another “best hashtags” link.
And yet another, this one aimed for writers.
Google search on using Twitter to promote your book. Because you know how easy it is to forget to Google.
More to come, I suspect.
D.
It doesn’t seem that likely that those people who think their <120 words comments are insightful enough to be interesting to the masses and the masses who think <120 words are indeed of great interest will be reading such long masses of words as books. Or more likely I’ve completely missed the magic of Twitter. I find the name alone is off-putting. At least I think I understand the general concepts (thanks for the hashtag links – learned something new this morning). Tumblr I have no idea about. And that’s just the known unknown.
I wonder if my late adopter thing comes from being out of the U.S, being 48, general crankiness or more likely all these and more. I also tend to think that being busy means I’m not looking for ways to fill my time and that being older means I’m not still trying to define what it is I like, since I already have a lot of stuff I like and am not giving enough attention to. Nor am I trying to be cool or up-to-date, which is good, since I’m neither.
Am looking forward to reading more about your Twitter experience and to see whether you find it useful/interesting.
Folks claim that Twitter is some sort of great marketing tool. I suspect your argument about attention spans doesn’t hold — Twitter has become so universal that people use it to commune while watching a TV show, political debate, etc. It’s true social media in real time, in a way that Facebook only approximates.
I’ll keep you posted.
Maybe the <120 words mean that Tweets are like Zen koans? The less said, the more meaning conveyed?
I don’t know about the marketing side of things as getting the right balance seems to be extremely tricky, but twitter has been a great place to make contact with a whole lot of interesting people with similar interests. One trick is to remember that you don’t have to catch everything everyone has said (impossible for someone with a life once your following list gets big enough).
Realized that my comments have greater than usual irrelevance, since it’s less than or equal to 140 characters. Well, at least your post prompted me to go put something on my Twitter profile.