More Social Networking

I've noticed that when you social network, people come out of the woodworks, which is both good and bad. On the one hand I want to leave high school behind, but it is nice hearing from old friends. Plus, they are generally supportive and when you're writing content for the Web, willing to check out what you've got to say. The digital world is a crazy place.

I have also noticed that it didn't take long for me to get hacked, or at least what I perceive as hacking. Now I don't have a lot of experience with Twitter, and when I ask my friends and acquaintances about it, I've found that people over the age of 40 don't seem to Tweet. If anything, they look at me like I'm stunted in my development (not too far off the bat on that one). I have to talk to people under 30 to get any advice, or celebrities, but they won't return my calls.

Either way, this what I've learned with Twitter. In a way, it really takes the place of Facebook (FB) because you can share the same mundane (inane?) information but in a quicker and easier format. It's almost like a dumbed down FB, and geared for mobile devices. Personally I think FB is more interesting, with way more information and ways to interact, but it's also an enormous time drain.

As I've mentioned, I've had a Twitter account for years, but never used it. I don't even have a smartphone, but recently it came to light that social media is the name of the game when writing for the Web, so when in Rome and all that good stuff. I started tweeting some more and before I knew it, my followers started to grow. Don't I feel special? What also happens is I seem to be following more people, as well. I have no idea how I became a follower, because I have no clue who 95% of these people are. What I've been told is to follow certain people with similar interests and tweet them back or re-tweet them, and they will start to follow you. It's all a game, but such is life with Social Media. A little disingenuous, but maybe that's the world we live in, right?

BTW, re-tweeting is when you read their tweet and then send it out to your own followers, as you might expect. I started to notice that re-tweets were being mysteriously sent out on my account. How exactly did this happen? I couldn't get any personal advice, and I couldn't look it up on customer service because I don't know how to describe or classify my problem (unauthorized re-tweets?). Finally my good friend SV tweeted me and said it could be a login problem and maybe I needed to make some adjustments, so that's what I did. We'll see how that works.

Twitter is a big world and I'm not even sure what I'm doing or if I even like it, but I can't let that stop me. One thing for sure, I am learning to be hip with the social media lingo, though I can't get too into it or risk looking like a big dork... hmm, maybe it's too late for that. What's also a little crazy is that I get all these followers who tweet in a foreign language, including an inordinate number of Arabic speakers. Not sure how that happened, but it's just another mystery of the Twitter universe.

Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to mmotrafficde4 for the pic.