As my MA degree in Cultural Heritage was coming to a close, I happened to see a post for a Digital Media internship focusing on social media with a national charity. I applied partly because I know nothing about Twitter.
I've had a Twitter account for several years, but I've never used it consistently. I've tried, but I've always sort of wondered what the point was. I am an avid Facebook user and far more of the people I care about are likely to see something I post there than ever would if I posted it to Twitter. I also am a bit wordy and my thoughts never seem to fit into 140 characters. And, the interface overwhelms me. I only follow around 90 people and organisations on Twitter currently and I still find it some what disorienting. What if I miss something important? Whereas Facebook feels secure, like a regularly updated newspaper for which the archives are never permanently lost, Twitter seems to move much faster, and that speed makes me anxious. I started using Twitter regularly this summer but only as a micro-newsfeed service as I was working on my dissertation, the topic of which required me to be current with the latest tech news (though I'm not sure I ever truly achieved "currentness").
Before my internship, this was all the point I could see in Twitter, and I didn't really believe my boss when she encouraged me to look into ways of building connects by engaging in dialogue. Why, I wondered would any Twitter follower want to listen in to conversations with one or two individuals? Don't they just want the news?
I stayed away from really engaging with our Twitter account until my boss was off one week and I said that I would agree to try monitoring it and responding to Tweets. I remember being very, very nervous about posting my first tweet from the official account. A few minutes later, I fell for a phishing scheme in a DM ("direct message" or private message for those of you who, like me until three weeks ago, don't know what means) that led to the hacking of our account and the spamming of hundreds of our followers. (Sorry!) Fortunately my boss was very understanding.
But for the past three weeks this has gone on--not the spamming but me essentially taking over the reigns of a national charity's Twitter account for two days a week. I've actually been granted quite a heady amount of freedom and power (though I like to think I've shown myself to be worthy of this by liaising with staff before doing anything I'm unsure about). My boss deserves a great degree of credit as well for letting the intern take the reigns.
So on Wednesdays and Fridays I go to the head office and I sit and stare at our Twitter account for six hours or so. I tweet, I re-tweet, and I schedule Tweets for the future so that they come up at a more appropriate time or so that we aren't sending out too much at once. I broadcast content and I engage in discussions. I stare at our stats. I read the feeds of our active followers. I find new people to follow. I read the feeds of other charities. I look at how they talk, what they bring up, and how they deal with sticky situations. I've been anxious about overloading our Twitter account with re-Tweets (People just post too much great stuff about walking!), so I've spent probably four hours or so just scrolling through other charities' accounts and simply counting the number of times they tweet per day. Some of the most successful accounts tweet 10+ times a day, which I would think would piss people off, but they are the ones with 100,000+ followers.
The result is that after I've spent some quality time reading about Twitter, observing how people and organisations behave on Twitter, and giving it a go myself, I feel like I have a much better grasp on what Twitter is as a medium and how to use it. And, it's started to be somewhat fun. In retrospect, this isn't that surprising--wouldn't I be more adept at anything if I devoted some time to learn it? I, however, have always made the erroneous and self-defeating assumption that most people who do things well simply have these skills inherently. If navigating Web 2.0 doesn't flow from my fingers spontaneously, then I should just regard myself as a disgrace to my generation and give up. Having dedicated time to sit down and contemplate Twitter, however, has convinced me that this stuff is, even for a late-adopter like me, somewhat learnable.
