The Twitter Project Experience Post

The world of Twitter was created as a way to connect with people, whether it be your family and friends, but also other people in the world who might have similar interests as you. It is a platform designed for people to be able to send a short message about their thoughts and feelings towards a certain topic, whether it be the 2020 Presidential Race or what they had for breakfast. Since Twitter is still one of the many social media platforms out there, it does have a space for people to market products/themselves on there. This can be done with tweets to get other people to buy a certain product or believe a way of thinking. For example, on the Twitter account for Elon Musk, he tweets about a new product called Tesla Solar which is coming soon. Twitter can also be used for more political reasons in a number of ways. Journalists have instant access to a large number of people who may follow them. They can tweet, update, and receive instant responses from thousands of people. This is an essential way for Twitter to get its news for a trending story, in fact that is how news trends are compiled for Twitter’s “What’s Trending” page. For presidential candidates, Twitter is a way to get points across quickly that represent their campaign. For instance, Bernie Sanders has been tweeting a lot about how disgusting it is to witness millions of workers lose their health insurance when this pandemic swept the U.S., resulting in mass job loss. There are also times when people use Twitter’s platform for their own gain. For example, when Broadway started announcing that their shows were getting postponed due to COVID-19, there were a lot of tweets regarding the closure of Broadway indefinitely. These tweets were helpful for the people who had planned to go in the future but also informational to people who wanted to just stay up-to-date with everything regarding COVID-19. Another instance when Twitter was used for communication was when the Boston Marathon Bombings took place. Since this was an urgent situation, many people were quick to tweet and react to other people without fact-checking at all. This is normal for people to behave like this but for law enforcement, they really had a hard time finding the suspects through online sources as there was so much false information regarding the event. Twitter was crowded with these inaccurate tweets and was a failure in terms of communicating as a society on Twitter. One last event that stands out is the passing of NBA legend Kobe Bryant. When news first broke from TMZ, a bunch of other news sources started reporting false information regarding who was actually in the helicopter when it went down. This is ESPECIALLY difficult to follow especially for the ones who knew Kobe the best, like his family. His family was contacted and then saw inaccurate information about what happened. This is truly tragic that the family of Mr. Bryant could not be given the right information because TMZ got there first and started a wave of tweets regarding the scene. This is the new age of media and will, unfortunately, play out like this sometimes. However, I chose to follow three accounts: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Elon Musk. How did the owner of Tesla get thrown in there you might ask? Well he is certainly not running for office (not yet obviously), and has a different approach to the platform. He uses viral memes and millennial slogans to his advantage. He attracts this demographic because with the new age of the automobile industry upon us with electric cars, he wants his company to appeal to the ones who are already used to this kind of information. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both politicians and they equally tweet frequently. Trump’s tweets can be a bit more aggressive and hurtful in context, while Bernie’s tweets are more informative and attach more to the working-class people who want a more socialist driven society. By nearly the entire world using Twitter as their main platform, it really is a huge net of information to grasp very quickly because of the low character count for tweets. Facebook is another great tool but it differs because you have a detailed profile where you can customize the photos people see and different jobs you worked or where you lived in your life. In short, Twitter wins the simplicity battle when it comes to viewing one’s account. Blogging is also a great tool for connecting to a certain audience, however, unlike most social networking sites, the word count will definitely exceed 280 CHARACTERS. With blogs, you will see each post have an estimated 500 or more words per post, as blog sites, give you an endless word count to communicate your post to who follows you. So if you want to post a quick update to anybody on Twitter, it can be short and sweet and get your point across in a flash. If you want to announce that you got a new puppy to commemorate a lost loved one, you would do that on Facebook. Finally, if you have interesting stories you would want to share, you should do it through a blog where people are there to indulge in one post and not twenty different posts in less than a minute.