To Tweet or not to Tweet

Hello all. This week, our reading consisted of Tweets, which seems kind of odd. But that's what the syllabus said.

To begin with, confessions: I confess that I already had a Twitter account. I set one up because my sister-in-law was having a giveaway on her food blog, and she gives away some great gifts. So, one of the ways to get an entry was to follow her on Twitter. I was lured in by the potential of winning cool kitchen gadgets, what can I say. I also confess that until this assignment I had never actually sent a Tweet. My last confession: I still don't get Twitter.

I noticed a couple of trends on Twitter. First, I see a lot of potential for marketing. I really do think it's a great tool for spreading the word about the events going on within your organization, and I find that aspect of it quite useful. But other than that, I am not sure what the point is.

A lot of the Tweets I saw were rather mundane things, like, "I just did this part of my job" or "I'm bored at work." Which , given the prompt Twitter offers ("What's happening?") and the character limit, is unsurprising. I couldn't think of anything worth mentioning, which is one of my aversions to Twitter to begin with. It's enough to live it, do I really need to tell the world about it?

Then there were the posts about professional related happenings. The frustrating thing was that there was no context, so it was kind of a 'had to be there' thing. Not understanding what they were talking about, I had little interest in the tweet.

Then there were the link tweets. (I confess, I posted one of these. Ironically, it was an article in part about Twitter contributing to information overload). But the links aren't very helpful because they don't give information about what the article is about, so you don't know whether it's worth looking at, and really, I have so many other things I could be doing, it's highly unlikely I'm going to be looking at any of them unless it's something a really close friend posted, and even then it's not highly likely.

I did find one feed that I'm interested in following after the assignment is over. It's GoArchivistJobs, I think, and it will be interesting to see what results it yields. 

So, I guess the end result is, as a professional tool, Twitter definitely has its place, but honestly, I just can't get that interested in reading about what everyone is doing all day long. And I hope no one is going to be super disappointed at the lack of output from my personal account, because I have a feeling it will be pretty limited in the future. (Although, there won't be much to miss. I can't be overly critical of anyone's tweets, because mine were abominable). And, just so the avid Twitterers out there know, I have nothing against you, and I'm glad you enjoy it. And who knows, maybe I'll figure out the appeal someday.