Last month, I did something I never thought I’d do. I signed up for Twitter.

I never thought I'd do that because, quite honestly, I thought the whole thing sounded silly. I’m over here fuming about the attention span of the American public being reduced to 30 seconds or less, and here is a tool that practically encourages this. I thought I was witnessing the decline and fall of the human mind. Then I remembered my seventh-grade English teacher.

She gave me an unusual assignment that ended up affecting the rest of my life. One day, she asked the class to practice using a thesaurus for a writing exercise. When she was done explaining their task, she turned to me and looked me straight in the eyes. “YOU don’t need a thesaurus. You do just fine when it comes to vocabulary. YOUR assignment is to take the last thing you wrote for me, and cut out the dribble.”

And it occurred to me that Twitter forces you to cut out the dribble.

Okay, you have my attention

I became curious about this popular website that people couldn’t stop talking about. What do people get out of this? How do a lot of little short messages actually help a business? What’s the point?

Then I actually took a look at it through someone else’s account. That was even more ridiculous. The most recent post had been added <1 minute ago. There were three of those. Four of them had been added 2 minutes ago, and three more tweets had been added 3 minutes ago. I thought, if I have to get the news this way, I’d have to stare at this thing all day in case I missed something. So far, I’m asking for a headache.

Then I realized that some of the other tweeters had already caught on to this and decided to make sure that we didn’t miss a single thing, and that was why they were posting the same exact message every 60 to 90 minutes. Oy.

What is the appeal here? How can people get any use out of this thing? I don’t remember the last time I felt this bewildered. I don’t feel bewildered very often, but the answer to this question completely escaped me. So I decided to dig in and find out for myself. I thought, I’ll make a better business writer if I can explain this to other people, but first I should explain it to myself. I tried reading social media books. Don’t get me wrong - they gave me enough information that I could begin to understand Twitter. But I can’t really learn anything without jumping in there at some point and experiencing it. I’ve tried. I can’t. So I sweated for a while over what my Twitter name should be, and I signed up for an account.

My first time

I had to think of a good first tweet. What do you say to a world that may or may not be reading? I looked at various profiles, and realized that I was going to use their previous tweets to judge whether or not I wanted to communicate with them. What do I want people to read on my profile? I didn’t want to write anything too heavy or too light, just something that says “Hello, nice to be here, what’s up.” I had been watching the movie “50 First Dates” and Drew Barrymore, who played an amnesiac, kept saying “There’s nothing like a first kiss!” That was it. “There’s nothing like a first tweet.”

Then I got my first follower. I was so excited! My Twitter journey was finally beginning. His handle was @AYOTheChamp, with the description “And A Yo And A Yo It’s The Champ.” I thought, this is an interesting start. Okay, he seems upbeat and fun. Moving on.

My next follower was @PREZERVMUZIC, who is now @ArtistPrezerv. He seemed like a good guy. He mostly tweeted about music, but didn’t mind sharing the drama surrounding the birth of his daughter. I think he found me because he follows @AYOTheChamp. Okay, so far I have a rapper from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a London dance hall artist from Jamaica following me. I wanted eclectic, I got eclectic.

My next follower was a woman whose website included the letters XXX. Her profile said she’s into threesomes. This was the first follower I had who left the roster. I wonder if she got insulted when I didn’t hit her up.

And that brought up some interesting things about Twitter that really puzzled me. Is this a spammy site? What’s up with the people who have hundreds of followers and don’t tweet at all? And why would someone quit following me? What’s wrong with me? I don’t need one more reason to feel bad about myself - maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

To follow or not to follow?

Then I started having fun. It turns out that part of the fun of being on Twitter is choosing the tweets you want to read by deciding who to follow. I can now read little bitty messages from Publishers Weekly, Women’s Wear Daily, the White House, Creative Commons, Stephen Fry, Mrs. Ashton Kutcher, and someone who calls herself Startup Princess. A couple of them even followed me back. The game seems to be that the person with the most followers wins, so I thought that was pretty good.

As I got more followers, I learned my first key point in Twitter etiquette. Apparently it’s considered rude not to follow someone back when they decide to follow you. Maybe that’s why Ms. XXX followed me. Maybe she was collecting followers and she assumed I would follow her back out of courtesy. I did follow new people back if they looked interesting, though, and I sometimes thanked people for following me, especially if I was amazed that they would be interested in anything I had to say. After one of my “thanks for following” messages - sorry, tweets - one guy even took the time to thank me for having the courtesy to mention him.

By the way, a mention seems to be a big deal on Twitter. From what I gather, it means that when you broadcast someone’s handle to all of your followers, the person you’re mentioning has an opportunity to be seen by a whole new group of potential followers. It’s like composing a handwritten thank-you note and thumb-tacking it to the town bulletin board.

I took a look at some of my new followers’ tweets, or lack thereof, and made a decision. I’m not going to refuse to thank people for following, but I’m also not on Twitter to volunteer myself for mindless advertising. I get enough of that in the Junk folders of my e-mail accounts. I guess I’m going to be rude if it means my feed or my wall or whatever won’t be loaded with stuff I can’t use. The Twitter feed moves too fast. Too much advertising, and I’ll miss the tweets I actually want to read.

Tweeting by the numbers

Here are the statistics to date. I signed up 25 days ago. In my first 7 days on Twitter, I accumulated 19 followers - exactly half of the followers I have now. My current number of followers is only two-thirds of the new followers, presumably because the other third “unfollowed” me. And I have posted 60 tweets so far. I don’t say something every day, but apparently when I tweet, I don’t just tweet one tweet at a time.

Is that good or bad? What do you think about all this?

Anyway, that was my first impression of Twitter. Stay tuned for the review of the original question: “What’s the point?”

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Reviewed by BillM
August 14, 2011
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

Maybe if you slog through the process, I won't have to. But what worries me is that you will convince me to add yet another platform to my collection.

I need one of those "get out of technology free" cards.