Social networking

Social networking is the bane of my life. Well one of them. And I know I’m not alone. Either you are like me, and find it heavy going, or you love it and spend far too much time playing around instead of working. Lately I’ve been making a big effort to sharpen up my social media skills.

I get blogging; it’s almost stream of consciousness rambling, a jotting down of random thoughts and ideas. It could even be a medium for testing ideas for stories. It’s certainly a wonderful use for the short snippets of writing that my mind anyway churns out as a sideline while I’m writing more serious stuff.

I can see the point of Facebook it’s quick and immediate, and is a relatively painless way of getting a piece of news out. I even worked out the idea behind Pinterest and have started to splatter my ‘boards’ with pretty pictures. Even though I don’t know what use it is as a tool for writers, I could easily spend a pleasant half hour browsing through other people’s pretty pictures.

But Twitter continues to evade me. I have tweeted. Twice in fact. But it’s rather like the quip of the pensioner taken on a daytrip to the seaside for the first time in her life and plonked in a deckchair on the front. When asked:

“How do you like the sea then, Doris?” she replied, “It’s all right I suppose, but is that all it does?”

This is exactly my problem with Twitter. What does it do? How do you join in? And join in with what? I’ve read tweets, and well, honestly! This is meant to be the social networking tool par excellence and I know I am missing some important point. The expression hash tags has something to do with the gap in my knowledge, and so does retweeting. Maybe when I find out what those expressions mean, the scales will drop from my eyes, and behold! Twitter will be revealed to me in all its splendour. Maybe.