A Gourmantic Affair with Twitter – Part 2: Relations

This is the second of a 3 part series. You can catch up on the first part, A Gourmantic Affair with Twitter Part 1 – Seduction.

As a novice studying twitter profiles, I quickly noted an emerging trend. There are those who seemingly follow all their followers (Following = Followers), those who appear as authorities (Following < Followers) and those who actively or aggressively follow others (Following > Followers) possibly in the hope of gathering numbers.

When it comes to friends, I’ve always been one for quality over quantity. I prefer a handful of good friends to a bunch of acquaintances and superficial connections. As a Gen X’er, I haven’t grown up collecting hundreds of ‘friends’ on Facebook or other social networks. Surely collecting ‘followers’ is merely a numbers game.

Where do I fit in?

A bunch of questions floated around like a swarm of bees on lavender flowers. Should I follow everyone who follows me? Should I follow the leaders in my niche area? Would the big guns notice me or follow me in return? Is this a popularity contest that tends to excessive egos? Do people with over 100 followers really keep up with all of them, let alone those with thousand followers? If I follow a lot of people, will I get more readers on Gourmantic?

It all seemed too much like teenagers at high school trying to impress or outdo one another.

What about the content of all these tweets?

I saw profile pages with one retweet after another as if it ran on autopilot. I pondered if they even read the blog posts/articles they’re tweeting. Others made me feel as if I were eavesdropping on a two-way conversation. I became bored quickly. Some were downright witty, informational and always packed a punch. I immediately followed them. Some were too obvious in greasing palms or the hands that feed them. I noticed established cliques.  I rolled my eyes at the politics. This was beginning to feel like a typical workplace environment. Did I really want to join those ranks?

Twitter can be daunting and time consuming.

Starting out in Twitter was undoubtedly a daunting exercise. I watched and studied people’s tweets before diving off the deep end and engaging others. Although not a stranger to online communities by any means, I felt like the new kid at school. I stumbled, made some mistakes and learnt something new in the process. But overall, every chunk of time spent on Twitter left me feeling overwhelmed and despondent. I wasted significant time and effort. Time that could have been put to better use by writing.

It was time Twitter and I had words. In no more than 140 characters, of course.

Next: A Gourmantic Affair with Twitter – Part 3 Compromise: Five Lessons I Learnt from Twitter

For as long as she could hold a pen, Ms Gourmantic has been an avid scribe feeding her passion for writing with an overactive imagination. Her repertoire includes works of fiction, short stories, travelogues as well as authoring blogs and photoblogs. She is currently writing a novel.

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