The Big Twit

Social Media-Twitterpated: I opened a twitter account this morning, and I can say that I am a big twit when it comes to understanding the mechanics of this social media. I don't find many of these social media accounts "user friendly" at my age. Maybe my brain is too concrete and not sufficiently flexible and intuative to go with the flow. When a novice, who was perfectly content being less wired, joins up, the site presupposes that the person knows all about it and can start right in. Maybe in the case of others, but not me. I decided to seek out some Twitter Tutorials on YouTube and found a few that promised to help make things easy. Unfortunately, the tutorials must have been done a while ago since some of the features they were tutoring me in are not found on the twitter page at which I was looking. Then I went to Wikipedia, and all I found was the history of Twitter, nothing for a novice to learn anything practical about using it. I then went to Google and found Mashable: The Social Media Guide. This is an excellent site for learning the how tos and where fors of social media. There I found the answer to the burning question: "What the retweet button, and how do you use it?"

I tried to use the Find People section like it was demonstrated in the You Tube tutorials, but the "email your friends and let them know you are tech savey by using your contact list" only allowed AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo, not Hotmail as shown in the tutorial. Of course, I have no contact list on AOL, Gmail, or Yahoo, but I do have an extensive list on Hotmail. So I had to do a lot of copy/paste manuevers to send out a notice that I have another wire sticking out of my head.

My "Alice in Technoland" adventure continued when I found I was following seven twitterers by only clicking on one Canyons District IT tweet. AND there was one follower. Wow, all this in a hour and a half.

On Mashable I found this quote about The Twitter Guide Book:
“Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends. But where’s the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop? To answer all these questions and more, we’ve assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!”   - Pete Cashmore, @Mashable