The Twitter Experience

What is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking website that allows users to publish short messages that can be seen by other users. The tweets can only be between 140 and 280 character, so you can't just type up a whole essay on it. Twitter, for the most part, is used up daily by people who use social media to tweet about themselves or reply tweet to other users. Most of the time though, it's used for marketing purposes. How does a company promote their product and reach their target audience? By using social media accounts. Everyone knows that pretty much 90% of the world uses social media. Whether it's for reading the news, streaming a live video, following and commenting on your favorite artist or celebrity's posts, or even just using it for plain ole fun. Now that social media has become way more popular than it was 5-10 years ago, a lot of people depend on social media because they have created a sort of "job" by just posting on their instagram. These people are called "Influencers." A lot of newspapers and politicians use twitter to their advantage to also reach younger crowds, knowing that around 18-25 year olds don't really read the newspaper or turn on the news to see who is running in the upcoming elections. So they turn to social media to get their topics out there. Newspapers mostly, are always tweeting about the articles they just posted, with a quick summary of it of course because of twitters limited character rules, and a link to go check it out. Twitter is also a place you can go to check of any breaking news about an event that occurred. Needless to say, twitter is pretty useful for many things.

There are many events that twitter covers in a brief tweet, usually has a link that shows the full article if you're still interested, that doesn't give away the full article, but gives just enough information to keep the reader intrigued. Lil Nas X released a single called Old Town Road and he remixed it with Billy Ray Cyrus and twitter went crazy. From memes (an amusing picture or video that spreads around the internet), to being happy Billy Ray was back in the spotlight for a hot minute. Many people said it's a pretty catchy song as well and I listened to it and I can say that yea, it's pretty good. Twitter was used to promote this song and they were successful in getting it to go viral. Twitter also gets important news across to its users by making the top story in their explore page the first thing you see. When the massacre in New Zealand happened, I first read about it on twitter and it was such a tragedy, but twitter did a good thing in keeping everyone still in the loop about what was happening. Sometimes you can even live stream news casts about important breaking news such as that one. The only negative thing of breaking news is that sometimes twitter tweets about celebrity news instead of actual real news that people should know about. I remember the whole Tristan and Jordyn Woods scandal broke out, it was all over twitter. Some would say it took over twitter for like a week, but it was unnecessarily all over everyones social media. I get that it was a pretty big story, but there were far more important things going on in the world to worry about.

The three topics/organizations I chose to follow were The New York Times, ASPCA and the PGA Tour. Choosing the New York Times was easy because I always like reading their articles. They are very well written and informative. The ASPCA is one of my favorite organizations because I am a fellow animal lover and all animals deserved to be loved and treated kindly. The ASPCA helps all those animals in need by using their voice to help them. It's a great organization to be a part of and following their twitter showed me all the great articles they write about and seeing all the achievements they have made relating to animals in need. Now, I followed the PGA Tour because 1) I have absolutely no clue about how golf is played whatsoever and 2) we were supposed to follow something we never really would. They tweet about golf related things and I just sit back and wonder what any of that even means.

This experience is different from actual blogging because of twitters character rules. You have to be specific and get straight to the point in your tweets. Using hashtags that other people search for also helps get your tweet to become somewhat viral if other people can relate to it. Sometimes getting straight to the point is kind of hard, but not impossible.


Image Credits