This is an interesting question.

I recently made a bit of an error.  By error what I actually mean is I made a huge assumption and we all know what that means don't we?  You don't?  Seriously?  Okay well consider this:

When you assume something you make an ass out of you (u) and me.

What I did was to assume everyone uses Twitter like I do.  Actually that's not strictly true few people truly use Twitter quite like I do but in general terms I use Twitter as a marketing tool.  I don't use it as for socially connecting with people.

In fact I find it very hard to comprehend how people do use twitter to socially connect with people.   I cannot help but to compare Twitter to Facebook in this situation.

Firstly you have the issue with tweets being restricted to 140 characters.  I regularly bust this limit when posting on Facebook and have friends that would use 10 tweets to convey half of what they like to write on Facebook.

Pictures on Twitter are hidden until you click on a link, on Facebook they are there for everyone to see.
Recently I shared this picture of my cat Dylan sleeping among my messy pile of books.  Those books are in a fireplace...ironic I know...sorry I'm digressing.


One of my followers tweeted that she couldn't see the cat, this was because twitter was only showing her the top half of the photo.

Direct Messages on twitter are a mess.  It's the worst implemented case of a messaging system I've ever come across.  In comparison Facebook has a system to rival Whatsapp including the ability to use it to make phone calls (this isn't the blog for me to discuss the purchase of Whatsapp by Faceboo so I won't go on about it like I usually do).  In twitter you are lucky if your messages appear in order and that's when they do appear.

Finally and MOST importantly less than a handful of my friends and family use twitter.   So for me Facebook is the better place to keep in touch with them.

I can quite happily accept that people do use Twitter as social media but I don't see it that way.

For me, as an independent author, Twitter is about marketing.  It's about having a global reach something I could never aspire to otherwise.


Take this recent tweet from one of my new followers, oh and feel free to follow Barry too if you like:


Barry is absolutely correct, how else indeed does an indie author spread the word about hers/his work?

This is a record of the post I made in twitter about my cat using the picture above courtesy of Twittonomy.com:






You can see that it was re-tweeted 18 times. The total number of twitter users it is estimate it could have reached is over 150,000.   You have to accept that there's a fair amount of overlap between the different accounts that re-tweeted the post as twitter is, by design, web of highly interconnected individuals.  However, it is likely the tweet had a change of being seen by over 100,000 twitter users.

Where else and how else would you have such a reach and for free?

I tweet an awful lot; approximately every 30-40 minutes and then there's retweets both automatic and those I choose to retweet when pursuing twitter myself.

What I learnt, when I made the assumption I discuss earlier, is that this can come as quite a shock to some who aren't used to this way of using twitter.  It's a lesson I will take on board but I don't intend to change the way I use the program I'll just be a little more mindful of how I offer to help others with respect to my twitter account.

Phil