ON BLOGGING ~ At First Tweet...

So last week I told you how I joined Twitter. Because everybody else is doing it. Because well respected news anchors use the word "Tweet" in their broadcasts. Because I feel it is my duty to bite the bullet and share the experience with our readers. I basically wanted to know two things. #1 - is it going to take up a lot of my time? #2 - how might I use it effectively to meet new folks and build our blogging community?

If I were to judge things based on my first week I would say it did not take up much time and it was not very effective. It probably wasn't effective because I didn't spend any time with it. I didn't spend a lot of time with it because the site is blocked by my office's firewall. Thank God for that. The availability of our personal e-mail and Google Reader throughout the day at work are tough enough temptations. Twitter, like Facebook and You Tube, are just not available to me at the office which means I am more productive doing what I get paid to do. And no, I don't use my cell phone to go online. I don't use my cell phone for anything actually. It sits turned off in my purse, lonely and waiting for me to need it when I have locked myself out of my car. You don't call my cell - no one, including me, knows the number. I call you if I need you. And texts are things I hear about but have never sent myself.

But anyway, back to Twitter. Within 24 hours of signing up, I had a handful of followers. Super! Mostly familiar faces, a few with connections to others I know. And then there are the mystery guests. One of them is an author. He's fishing. Or phishing. Whatever. He's just looking for newbies like me to be awed by his out of the blue friendship and reciprocate the love, falling into his trap of book promotion. Well, I may be new to Twitter, but I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. I see this all the time on Goodreads. And on blogs. And I'm sure it happens on Facebook or any other social media outlet. So, Mr. Author, you can follow my genius tweets all you want, but it is a one way street I'm afraid. And considering you are following almost 1,500 people I'm pretty sure you won't even notice what I have to say anyway. Because it's all about you, right? No thanks. Following him would get in my way of productive twittering. Tweeting. Whatever.

My other discovery this week is that people on Twitter follow lots of people. I only elected to follow a sampling of 4 people my first week as an experiment. A family member, a book blogger, a freelancer and the person who gushed to me about Twitter to begin with. I wanted to see how these different sectors used Twitter and get a feel for how things work. I learned that it is impossible to keep up with what everyone has to say unless you stare at that thing all day long. It seems to me that everything will just get lost in the crowd. There were lots of personal updates about their day like you see on Facebook, along with suggested reading at other sites and blogs, contest offers, questions to prompt discussions on other sites and of course, self-promotion of blog posts.

I sent out one tweet the moment I opened my account. I didn't even know it was a Tweet. I just saw a box and typed in a status update. I decided that from me, less is more. I don't want to bombard Mr. Author with a bunch of nonsense after all. A tweet of the week from me sounds about right. But will anyone ever see them? It will get bumped off the screen in about 2 minutes with all those tweets from the hundreds of other people they are following. So I'm not sure how to connect with people there yet.

Week two starts now so I just created my Tweet of the Week. Want to know what it is? You'll have to go find me there - I'm not posting the same stuff everywhere I go. I'll let you know next week if anyone is actually paying attention. Otherwise it becomes like that age old question...if a Bumble tweets and there is no one reading, is it still witty?

Our Twitter handle (is that what you call it?) is @thebumblesblog - or at least I think that's how it is expressed.  So for God's sake - go follow us there so we're not all alone.