A Week in Twitterville

(Or: everything I know about Twitter I’ve learnt by mistake)

Twitter is another country. It’s a country where everyone is on 24-7. And you’re the newbie immigrant, fresh off the boat. You’ve stumbled on a land where everyone seems to know what they’re doing, everyone has a language you can’t quite understand, there appear to be rules but heaven knows what they are. And boy, it’s noisy, isn’t it? So you blunder around, you mess up, you make a fool of yourself (or was that only me?).

At the time of writing this blog, I have only slightly more than 150 followers and 79 tweets so I am a bare dot on the huge intangible mass that is Twitter. In other words I am not a social networking ingénue. But I am human. So, these are not Twitter rules by any stretch of the imagination. This is my own personal Twitter survival guide pulled together after emerging blinking from a week of total Twitter immersion. I hope you don’t mind if I share. If they make sense to you use them, share them (retweet them!  Get me, picking up the lingo already).

Yesterday I had to give myself a good talking to. It went something like this:

1. You have nothing to prove. No, really. You may one day even have 5,000 followers. But they won’t be hanging on to every word you say. They really won’t. Unless you’re Barack Obama, and last time I looked, you weren’t.

2. The world will go on turning if you don’t tweet for a day or two. So go on relax, prise your fingers from the keyboard. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax.

3. Remember the old days when you came across something interesting, you’d want to share it with your friends and family? How often would that happen – once a day? Two or three times a week? So all of a sudden you’re sharing everything you do from the minute you get up to the minute you go to bed? Why? Oh yes, because you can. Can doesn’t mean should.

4. Twitter is not your confidante. It’s not your best friend. Twitter is a stranger you’ve just met at a cocktail party or business function. Remember that.

5. Only tweet when you feel moved to not because you feel you must. You don’t have to be the most articulate, the most intelligent, the funniest, the most resourceful, insightful, the coolest... you just have to be you.

6. You have a real life. Remember those things attached to your body? They’re called legs. Use them, move them around a bit. Feels good, doesn’t it? Get outside. Speak to real people – you know the ones you can actually physically see. With your eyes.

7. Oh yes, performance anxiety. Just because you have people following you, you don’t have to be perfect. See Rule 1 and 5. Go ahead and get it wrong sometimes, look stupid. Laugh at yourself.

8. It’s not a competition... unless you want your epitaph to be “This woman/man was amazing on Twitter.” Ignore the follower count.

9. Twitter is not for the paranoid – if you are even slightly paranoid, you will become more so. That person who unfollows you, the deafening silence you get when you tweet something you thought was really really hilarious... all that will serve to convince you, you are the outcast at the party, so that’s why I needed rule number 10:

10. Have a Twitter Strategy – okay for the first week or so, you might get so immersed in Twitter you lose all sense of reason (your house doesn’t get cleaned, the kids don’t get fed). But once you wake from it, in my case with a bewildered look on my face (something I like to call my Twitterface), a strategy looks like a sure thing. Decide what you want to use Twitter for – business, social, a mixture of both - and then stick to it.

11. More importantly - have a Twitter Antidote. Twitter can get noisy and exhausting and overwhelming. Do something else. You were you before Twitter happened, you still are. Though perhaps slightly more dishevelled. Would it hurt you to brush your hair once in a while?

12. Tune out the noise. Personally I think it’s only good manners if someone follows you for you to follow them right back. They’re extending their hand in greeting. You wouldn’t refuse to shake someone’s hand in real life – why do it on Twitter? But your Twitter world is going to get real noisy real soon. Enter Tony Mack @TonyMackGD who put aside his own incredulity at my ignorance to kindly tell me how to use Tweetdeck to create my own lists. Thank you Tony!

13. You’re not missing anything important if you don’t read every tweet. If it’s that important it will be on the news.

14. Lighten up. Being sociable all the time is hard work, and more so if you’re pretending to be someone you’re not.  It may feel like another country, but wherever you go, there you will be... even on Twitter.

Best wishes,



Dawn