Zwanziger Blog #8

Blog #8

When I first heard that we were going to be tweeting every day for our class, I was filled with a little bit of dread. Twitter has always been the social media that I love going on for looking at other people’s content but have never felt the need to tweet on my own. This is mainly because I never really know what to tweet. When I was in high school though, I used to tweet excessively. I mean like at least 20 times every day. I have no idea who I thought liked me that much that they wanted to hear every detail of my life, but hey to each their own. Other than that, though, I had basically stopped tweeting by the time that I had gotten to college. Now, on my personal twitter I know how the people I follow talk, and I knew that it was going to be very different from the kinds of tweets that I was going to tweet for this class. Because I knew that the audience I would be tweeting towards was different than my regular twitter, I wanted to make my twitter different than my personal one and seem more scholarly. Hodapp discusses this and says that “the establishment of online identity provides us with an opportunity to create an idealized version of the self, filtering out the characteristics about ourselves we find undesirable or troublesome, and focus on the traits that we admire or desire” (Hodapp). In this case, I wanted to make sure that my twitter embodied my school/class needs and wanted to make it seem more professional than I would have on my regular twitter. While I did have a good amount of anxiety about not knowing what to tweet, I wanted to try and make the best of it. The first thing that I tried to do was “decorate” my account as much as I could. By this I basically meant that I had uploaded a profile picture and a header, which to me was a lot of good hard work! After that though, I knew that’s when the challenges would begin. When I first started trying to tweet, I cannot explain how many drafts I created or how many times I would sit there and re-word my tweets. I was extremely nervous about what my classmates would think about my tweets and was definitely overthinking everything. This struggle lasted for about the first two weeks of the assignment and I was always extremely pleased with myself after I had completed my one tweet of the day. Tweeting is hard. However, after the first few weeks I started becoming a lot more comfortable about what I was saying. I felt that I had learned the voice that I needed to speak in for this assignment and felt comfortable tweeting whatever came to mind. I started tweeting more about what actually interested me, rather than what I thought my classmates wanted to hear. One thing that we had discussed in class is how people feel a sort of “high” when someone else likes or retweets their tweet, which is definitely true. While I know that everyone was forced to retweet at least five things every week, it didn’t stop me from feeling good when someone would retweet mine. Realizing how I felt when someone would like or retweet my tweet, I started making more of an effort to try and do the same to others. Not only that though, but sometimes my tweets would be liked or responded to by the companies I was tweeting about, which I always thought was exciting.

 One of the funny things was that even though I had created this twitter as an assignment, some other people who I have had class with in the past started following this twitter account too. While I was starting to actually enjoy tweeting and felt a lot more comfortable sharing my thoughts online, however dumb they may have been, it still was a little bit of a struggle to remember to tweet daily. For me, once I start something it is a lot easier to work off of that momentum, which often was the case for my twitter. Some days I would find myself not being able to tweet or totally forgetting to tweet, whereas other days I would tweet at least three things because they kept coming to my mind. I wasn’t just tweeting random things, but more things that were occurring in my everyday life, which was really helpful when I had questions about some things because twitter has a polls option!

 Being able to know the audience that I was tweeting for (in this case it was really easy because they were my classmates) definitely helped when trying to get more interactions on my content I was tweeting. Even though I had not talked to most of my classmates before, I felt like I got to know many of them through seeing them tweet. While there is definitely a difference between being friends with someone in real life and being friends with someone online, I found that a lot of the same people would engage with each other’s content which was a fun experience. It definitely made tweeting less awkward in the initial stages and felt like everyone was encouraging one another to keep up with this assignment. I also noticed that the more content you post, the more engagement you’re going to get. People want to see that you’re being active with your social media, which makes them want to engage with you. While I have always known this in the back of my mind, I have somewhat taken the backseat for many years when it comes to social media. It was nice to regain a lot of what I had lost for many years regarding social media, and I think it even helped with my offline confidence a little as well. While it may not seem like much and actually typing it sounds really dumb, I think that I regained some of my confidence about social media through this assignment. While I know that I did not tweet every day (but I made my best efforts I promise) I do think that I learned a lot through this assignment. Before this assignment, I had primarily kept my twitter open to my personal twitter account, however after this assignment I would always keep it on my school account as I was always interested to see what my classmates were posting as well. Overall, I think I did a pretty good job on this assignment and feel that it taught me a lot more than many assignments have in the past. I will definitely miss having our little community this assignment has created and I hope that more people will continue to use their accounts in the future. In all, I would grade myself a 45/50 as I definitely learned a lot through this assignment, as well as tweeted and retweeted regularly.