My first attempt at
Twitter was way back when in 2008 and it doesn't make for a successful nor interesting story. I opened an account, spent about 5 minutes creeping around this new social media tool trying to figure it out, was beyond confused and gave up. Fast forward to 2010 and attempt numero dos. This time I found a few relatively interesting people to follow, oh and look at that! I've got 8 followers! As you probably guessed, round 2 wasn't pretty either. Finally, sometime in 2011 enough was enough. I am studying communications/PR for goodness sakes! Who am I to talk to people about the importance of social media and promoting their brand when I myself can't even figure out how to use the damn thing? This time I was NOT going to fail. I convinced my good friend and social media connoisseur
Sarah Bustard to give me a hand on how to use this foreign tool and god bless her patience with me. She kindly explained to me the concept of retweeting, hashtags (I thought it was just a number sign!) and suggested people that I should follow. Slowly but surely I got the hang of this phenomenon called Twitter, and now, 2,421 tweets later, I am a self proclaimed addict. I truly believed that I could never love a social media website more so than
Facebook. As with many other things in life, I was so very wrong.
So, where is this going? Well, ever since I created this blog I am finding there is a direct correlation between how much I tweet and how much I blog. When I first got into Twitter, it was a sporadic affair. I would tweet maybe once a week, if that. As time has progressed, so has the multitude of my tweets. I honestly couldn't even tell you have many times a day I tweet now (especially if this definition includes retweets). What I have found is that the more I tweet, the less I blog. Once you wrap your mind and keyboard around 140 characters or less, writing a whole blog post is a much more daunting task. The more I tweet, the less motivation I seem to have to actually sit down and conspire a blog post and it makes sense. Twitter is the efficient, spontaneous cousin of the blog. Twitter is always there, it provides immediate responses and you can express yourself in that exact moment. The blog on the other hand, requires more time, more thought and more effort. It is the very definition of "slow and steady wins the race" It is the turtle and Twitter is the hare. In today's fast paced society no wonder most people opt for Twitter!
Now I am not saying that people should blog just for the sake of blogging, by all means if you haven't got anything to see please don't write a tedious blog post about what you ate for breakfast this morning (thats what instagram is for). What I am suggesting is to take a little more time to reflect your thoughts and think about things that you DO want to say (and in more than 140 words). Personally I find the process of writing therapeutic and necessary. Twitter offers immediacy that we so desperately crave, but it doesn't offer the insight that we need. Take the time to write a blog post about something near and dear to your heart and try to avoid thinking "Why should I blog about it when I can tweet about it?" If you are passionate about something, anything, one lone tweet will not help your cause. People want to read about other people. Its in our genetics to be interested in other human beings. If you want to feed the hungry and you tweet "Feed the hungry please" well I am not sure how compelled I will be to help with your cause. If you write a blog about how important it is to you and why, and I can see your passion and enthusiasm in your story, well than hell yes I will support you!
Anyway, these are just my thoughts. I love to write and love to read even more so it is quite possible that I am biased. I am making it a personal goal to try to tweet less and blog more. I hope to be able to bang out at least one blog post every two weeks and hopefully my chronic tweeting doesn't affect this!
What are your thoughts about tweeting vs. blogging?
