Making Twitter Happen

AARON DURAND PHOTO

Twitter is celebrating nine successful years — including going public in 2013 — and I still can’t under stand why people in Hawaii and beyond aren’t down with it.

As of last month, Twitter has 1 billion fewer monthly active users than Facebook. Asking around, many people I talked to said they made an account but “never got around to using it.”

Instead, they scroll through their Face-book feeds, like you can do on Twitter, making multiple posts each day, like Twitter, unknowingly burying themselves in the Bermuda triangle of Facebook’s news feed algorithm because of lack of engagement.

Twitter gets around 500 million posts each day. Celebrities, sports pros, political leaders, every brand imaginable and many people you know in real life have active accounts. While it originally was meant for text-based updates of 140 characters or less, there also is plenty of room for photos, videos, links and all those emojis to make your point.

Facebook is more personal, made for your inner circle.

Twitter is for the world.

It’s you talking to yourself, your friends, your heroes and everyone in between. It’s like a group text that we’re all engaged in all the time.

The sheer amount of people who aren’t using Twitter is what’s ruining Facebook. 
If you are making more than three posts to your Facebook a day, you should be using Twitter. Twitter is meant for high volume.

If you are obsessed with breaking news or developing stories, you should be using Twitter. There really isn’t a cleaner, more streamlined way to get the most up-to-date details on a story, especially with easily searchable #Hashtags. The 2009 earthquake in China, Michael Jackson’s death and Google phone all were news stories that broke first on Twitter. Ongoing updates about everything from plane crashes, air strikes, political elections and whatever else you’d want to know IMMEDIATELY, are right there at your fingertips.

If you are watching a TV show series finale or sports event and can’t help but share all of your clever observations, predictions or reactions, you should be using Twitter. The best is when athletes, stars, directors and producers also are engaged in the conversation, which happens quite often.

If you are posting to Tumblr, a Facebook photo album or Instagram, it’s better to NOT also post the same content to Twitter. Replicating your posts across multiple social media platforms is the fastest way to make other users gloss over, mute or unfollow you.

Follow the right people — whether they are in your personal network or influencers who are just really good at posts (ahem, Will Ferrell) — and joining the conversation will be a given.

Send me your @ name. I’ll follow.

@SUPERCW

Christa Wittmier is “SUPERCW” on all social media. Find her on Snapchat, SoundCloud, Twitter, Vine and Instagram. By night, she is known as DJ SuperCW. By day, she is known as senior marketing director for Young’s Market Company of Hawaii. Her nightlife blog SuperCity runs every Wednesday on HonoluluPulse.com