It was one year ago when I wrote my first tweet. So its time to drop some lines about my first 365 days on Twitter. How did I use this service and was it worth to join it?
It was a cold day in December when I was on my way to Vienna by train. I had just joined Twitter and was thinking about what I should tweet. I don't remember the exact words, but my first tweet went something like:
'On the way to Vienna going to visit an
exhibition
about works of Georges Braque'
It was done. My first tweet was published. I felt wonderful. I felt like I had written something important and the whole world has read it. One problem though. At that moment, I didn't have a single follower.
365 days later, my profile count shows 22.700 followers. So a good time to think about my presence on Twitter. Was it a good idea to join? Has tweeting changed something in my life?
Well, frankly said it was a good idea and it has changed my life in a certain way. This was not a result of the Twitter service itself it was more a result of my thoughts how I should use the service.
As I am a traveller it was certain I would like to tweet about my trips. About my visits to castles, museums and exhibitions. And about the lovely landscape I saw during my train rides.
Although this was a nice way to define my purpose in what I would like to tweet, it was not the answer to the question on how I would like to use the new service for this purpose.
Should I be a broadcaster, giving followers the latest news? Should I try to sell something in order to fund my travels or should I try to become a kind of ranking star?
Or should I use it the way I have used all forms of communication since I started to write letters to my international pen pals? Just say 'Hi!' and try to find out if what we had in common?
Well, in the end I decided to use this new service to get in contact with people all over the world and to find my own audience. Better to be a nice fellow in a group of people I know than to be a star in a ranking system where nobody knows the formula.
It is also better to be friends with a bunch of lovely people with whom you can party for a minimum of expense than trying to sell something to earn money to spend on things you would probably not need if you already have these nice people to party with
And what about broadcasting? Well, I think our world is far too big for our small lives. That is why I find it is important to use our time to learn more about others whenever and however we can. But we can only learn something new by listening, not by broadcasting.
So after all these considerations I decided to fill my tweets not only with some information about my trips and destinations but also with many questions about topics I would like to learn more about.
And as a result I got a lot of wonderful conversations which helped me to understand many things around us much more better. These amount of interesting conversations with many different people make me think I had a good year on Twitter.
Its time to end my piece. What were your thoughts when you started to tweet? Did you have similar or different considerations? Please @ me to share them with me (@travelwriticus) on Twitter.
More notes and links
Notes of a Traveller