Twitter: To Tweet Or Not To Tweet

Twitter allows you to post things that matter the most to you. Twitter is a social media platform that is full of useful and useless knowledge depending on the way you look at it. Twitter is used along with the other social media sites to get a person’s viewpoint to the world.

Twitter is used in more ways than just socializing. People and companies use Twitter to promote themselves or their business. Out of all the social media platforms available, Twitter is the most accessible one. Other sites require the user to jump through so many loopholes to get started, but Twitter makes it simple for everyone to use. People of all different ages use Twitter on the daily basis. Outside of promotional use, people use Twitter as their main source of information. There are a ton of news companies who post tweets that contain a photo; a quote, or even a shortened link that’ll take you directly to that article. For instance, if you like multiple opinions regarding one story, you can always scroll through your feed to see if someone else posted information regarding that story as well. Twitter can allow the user to check so many different things in a short amount of time. Twitter is also great for people who like to skim read. In case you don’t have time to read the full article right away, you can always favorite the tweet, and read it later on.

As mentioned earlier, Twitter is a great platform for more things than just socializing. Twitter is fairly simple to access so journalists can use that feature to their advantage. News is always constant and never static so a journalist has to stay on top of every aspect of every story that he or she is currently covering. Let’s say a news story is constantly updating because a lot is going on at the moment. The journalist can then post short tweets on what’s going on instead of writing a long winded article every time something new happens. These tweets can contain direct links to the story; photos from the live event, and even direct quotes from other people who are attending the event. Once the event is finished, then the journalist can publish his story. This point also ties into politics because campaigns are constantly going through changes. During election night, you couldn’t escape information regarding the presidential debate. That alone can show you how important social media is when it comes to politics. Many people call the last election the Facebook election because Obama’s media team raised so much awareness about him through social media. Without social media being as successful as it is, Obama would’ve had to find another venue to promote his policies and his vision for the future. As an organizational tool, Twitter can be quite effective as well. If you’re working with a team on a group project, you can see what the other people have contributed already. By seeing what they did, you won’t fall into the trap of doing the same thing. You can do your own work, and still contribute to your group as well. You won’t slow your group down by posting the same content.

For my secondary Twitter account, I decided to follow a few things that are important to me and they’re important to social media as well. I primarily wanted to follow people or groups that promoted politics because we should be informed on what’s going on around us. I also decided to follow some groups who have experience in the media production field. I wanted to see what they were doing, and how that might influence what I do in the future. I also decided to follow the NBA because I’m a huge basketball fan, and I wouldn’t mind working for the NBA in the near future. First, I decided by following Barack Obama. Obama won the presidential campaign by beating out Mitt Romney. It’s good to see what the President is doing through Twitter because I would rather read Twitter than watch any of the presidential debates. Politics bore me to death. I also paid close attention to what CNN posted on a daily basis because I respect their opinion on current events. They’re one of the broadcast stations that I actually respect. Out of all the groups I decided to follow, I feel that the NBA tweets the most. From a statistical standpoint, there are 82 games in a single season not including the playoffs. Each team has fifteen active players ready to play at any given time, and there’s always late breaking stories as well. On any given day, something amazing can happen so NBA has to tweet everything that happens.

I honestly would prefer to blog than use Twitter on any given day. I tweet maybe a few times a day, and during this project we had to tweet a lot. After a while, Twitter just became boring and less attractive. Twitter succeeds at what is does on a daily basis, but it shouldn’t be used for a project. There were times where I knew I had a lot to say for a certain topic, but I would have to break up that long tweet due to the tweet restriction of 140 characters. If someone caught the last tweet of a series of tweets, they might not know what’s going on. They would then have to try and find the rest of tweets to get an understanding of what’s going on. Blogging is an easier platform to deal with because there isn’t a word limit, and you can type away to your heart’s desire. The other thing that annoys me about Twitter and other social media sites is the amount of garbage that gets posted on your feed on any given day. That’s one of the main reasons why I hardly scroll through my feed anymore. I could choose to remove those people or groups who annoy me, but that would require too much effort and time that I don’t have. For some Twitter is the best platform out there, but I tend to think there are better platforms available to get your message across.

In conclusion, you can make Twitter work for you in any way you see fit. You can post senseless comments about yourself or you can post information that’s useful to anyone. At the end of the day, the choice is yours to make.