The week before the Design Bloggers Conference…I finally had to break down and do something that does not come easy to me…ask my teenager to help me with Twitter. I kept hearing the phrase “hash tag” and had no idea what that was. I mean I knew that this “#” was a hash-tag…but why was it becoming an integral piece of Social Media Lingo? The good news is that by the end of this weeks Design Bloggers Conference…I not only knew what it was but I was actively employing the little buggers myself!
#dbc2013
For those of you that are as green as I was….Let me explain. When you are sending a tweet…it is like a little teensy snippet of what you are up to …at that moment..in fact, it was explained that RARELY do folks go back and read old tweets or ones they missed. So Twitter is a way to connect to who ever it is you want to connect with..right then and there.for example:
” @leslidevito #dbc2013 barbara barry is making me cry…it is like she can see inside my soul.”
anyone that follows ME and my tweets OR the topic of the design bloggers conference (#dbc2013) (WAY more likely) can see that tweet. In fact, for the two days of the conference dbc2013 was the top “trending” topic. What Is “TRENDING”? WELL, They have a little running list, of whatever people are talking about on twitter at all times, and that is what is “trending”..i.e. popular...hot!!! right this minute the top trending item is
#sxsw (South by Southwest) …and grumpy cat!
So Twitter is an IN THE MOMENT social media device….
….so how do you send a “tweet”?
Well, for starters you have to log onto twitter and sign up. That being done, you can design your page, or they have backgrounds you can use to get started. Twitter is a social media device that serves different purposes for different people. At the conference we could all see, what we were all thinking and feeling and seeing and hearing as we all were on this ride together..from all vantage points…
….on a day to day basis…for me, I use it to link my blog posts and my artwork to a larger audience…espeically to people who I met for whom twitter is their FAVE device…they have MORE followers = more tweets = more exposure.
Probably one of the BEST pieces of advice I heard, over and over again at the DBC2013 was that while it is important (if you wish to expand your horizons) to understand Social Media…it is more important that you find which ones work FOR YOU…
The Current Social Media Devices I use are :
facebook, twitter, pinterest, instagram, Google+
and of those the ones which are the BEST FIT are PINTEREST AND INSTAGRAM. BOTH of those are visual and help me to communicate my ART the best. I am pretty good at keeping up with Pinterest..and have a ways to go with instagram. Rome was not built in a day… nor do you need to feel bad if this is new to you. The world is changing…I thank God for my teenagers, because they have helped me get acquainted with the new Social Media…I want to be able to communicate in all the ways available…for after all…
COMMUNICATION IS KEY!
Thank you for this post! I keep hearing I need to be on Twitter but as I don’t know anything about it, I’m slightly hesitant to sign up. My 11 year old put the Instragram & Pinterest apps on my itouch (I am so behind with technology) so that I would get into them more. I finally figured out how to post on Instragram and having the Pinterest app on my little mobile toy has me looking at it far more, so I suppose Twitter is the only one left!
I am still learning, and I forgot to mention anything about “retweets” (basically means ‘ditto’ or ‘pass it on’) and reply is basically self exclamatory. The tricky part for me and something I am still figuring out is when do I put my @leslidevito….every time? only when I send it ????
input welcome!!!! together we can do this!!!!
Leslie, I just wanted to thank you for this post. I’m still trying to figure out the social media world and your explanation of twitter was so helpful.