Twitter

I have used Twitter in the past only for business purposes. I have never really liked it and I think in a way, my negative perception of Twitter hinged me from actually giving it a serious try. I am not a social media expert, but Twitter seems to have piggy-backed on the success of Facebook – a platform for people to share personal information and receive some sort of “recognition” or “approval” for it. It can be downright dangerous, especially if you have a stalker!

In my own words, I’d like to explain to you my basic understanding of Twitter:

·       * You can write only 140 character sentences…most likely to represent your current activity/thought if it’s a personal account OR a catch phrase if you’re a business.

·        * The use of hashtags – If you use hashtags such as #(hashtag)name, you are able to see other posts that refer to the same #(hashtag)name as yours. This is particularly popular for events, celebrities and other topics that are looking to receive some sort of recognition and raise awareness. This hashtag has also been introduced with Facebook – which makes it easier to keep track of the volume of people that are talking about or are involved with a certain topic/event. According to Hashtagifyme.com, the most popular hashtag for the month of September is #gameinsight.

·       *  People/Businesses you subscribe to show up on your newsfeed like stories, some containing writing only and pictures, but most often than not, there is a link that will expand on the particular story being reported.

·       *  It is impossible to not have ads between your feeds and even on the right side of your screen; after all, how will Twitter make money off of you otherwise?

·        * The stories/updates presented appear to have a somewhat chronological order, although many times, I don’t particularly pay attention to that.

·        * On the upper right hand side corner, Twitter will make suggestions for you to follow certain celebrities or businesses, based on your current following preferences….yes, YOU are being monitored!

Advantages/Disadvantaged of Twitter compared to blogging:

* Advantages of Twitter:

·                           - Appeals to people with a very short attention span

·                          -  Can catch your attention through “catch phrases”.

·                          - Easy to skim through as all posts are short!

* Disadvantages:

·                         - Most often, people use blogs to report on an event, or story or share information and a link on             Twitter will get you right there; so in a way a disadvantage of Twitter is that you cannot share             your full story without having your audience click on a link.

·                        -  People can easily forget Tweets because of the abundance of information received at any one               time.

·                        - Hard to find a tweet depending on how many people and businesses you follow and how often             they tweet.

I cannot think of an example of misinformation that spread via twitter in the last 6 months, but I’d like to give you the context of how that is possible. In this day and age, where information is demanded in abundance and served in abundance, platforms like twitter present a perfect opportunity for false information to be born and spread like wildfire. First of all, judging by the number of tweets per day, even reaching tweets as high as #143,199 per SECOND, it is virtually impossible for content not to contain false or misleading information. Secondly, those that are tweeting all this information are not journalists working for renowned media companies, but rather regular Joes like you and I. Since when do we believe everything we hear? Truthfully, people believe what they want and even sometimes lie on purpose just to receive attention or create havoc. Now, it is true that we are able to “edit” our content just as fast, but how many people actually go back and do that especially when something is done on purpose?