Twitter – The Land of the Tweets

Twitter logo blue
Source: http://www.twimg.com

The logo is only ever displayed in blue and white. Never black.[/caption]

When I returned from Africa I noticed that Facebook wasn’t the be all and end all I thought it would always be. Many of my friends had practically disregarded Facebook for other messenger apps such as Whats App, Viber, Snapchat, Pinterest or Twitter. Some of my friends were even using two or more of these messenger apps.

I brushed this off in the first place because Facebook is well Facebook. It was as I said the be all and end all of communication for my generation! If you weren’t on Facebook you were considered a bit strange let’s be honest. People my age couldn’t understand why someone wasn’t on Facebook. Like, how were they meant to know what everyone was doing?

           

For this blog post I am going to talk about Twitter. Twitter has really grabbed my attention in the past few months. So much so that I even signed up during the summer to see what it was all about. It has been recently though that I’ve actually started to use it. I went on it initially because as us Irish put it

‘’to have an oul’ look’’

.

I will give you my candid opinion; I didn’t think much of it at all. But when I actually began to use it and follow people I thought it was brilliant. I believe it has surpassed Facebook in many of the tools it uses. Twitter has many tools that Facebook doesn’t offer. Such tools like hashtagging, trending topics, the @ sign, followers and verified accounts.

Twitter allows you to send and receive tweets which are like micro blogs to your friends, companies, celebrities, etc. You are the decider of what appears on your page – no advertisements unlike Facebook. You may subscribe or follow who you choose and there tweets will appear in reverse chronological order on your newsfeed. These tweets and yours are available for anyone to read. You are notified on your Twitter account about what topics are trending at the moment so you can stay up to date.

You use a hashtag when you want to define what topic your post is or group it together with others.

The @ sign allows you to tag someone specific in your post using the format @username. Whether it is for them or about them you are guaranteed it will be read instead of just a general tweet.

Also verified accounts are specifically made for celebrities, businesses and other public figures page. When these pages receive the verified account label it shows that this is the person’s genuine account and not a fake one someone made up.

As mentioned on an ABC news piece we learn,

According to Piper Jaffray’s semi-annual teen market research report, Twitter overtook Facebook in terms of popularity with teens. Twenty six percent named Twitter as their “most important” social site, while only 23 percent said Facebook was most important, down from 42 percent the year before.

ABC news article, ”Teens Are Leaving Facebook And This is Where They Are Going.”

As a result of this, Facebook has taken on many of the tools Twitter originally created. For example, you can now tag people and use hashtags on your status updates on Facebook. But it still isn’t the same. Facebook now have verified accounts and hashtagging but it is seen as odd. Also your newsfeed is always still clogged with advertisements.  The effects of Twitter do rival Facebook. At the end of the day Twitter is just more sophisticated social networking.

As a consequence, Twitter has surpassed in popularity for communication for the modern day teenager. And yes. I am on the band wagon.