The very first time I heard about Twitter, I remember thinking it sounded like an unnecessary Facebook rip-off. At the time, Facebook was most popular platform being used for all of our social media status updates as well as photos. Twitter was only very short text sentences, so I didn’t see its relevance until about a year ago when I started streaming video games on Twitch. Additionally, Twitter has expanded over the years to include multi-media much better, such as photos, gifs, article links, and video clips. Early on in my streaming career, a few viewers advised me to get more active on Twitter in order to increase exposure of my stream. At first, I didn’t really take their advice seriously. However, after using Twitter daily for a little over a year now, I see just how right they were.
Twitter has not only increased exposure of my stream, but it has allowed me to network much deeper into the World of Warcraft community and get followed by the most prominent, famous people in this exact field and more. It has allowed me to network with professional gamers from other games such as Call of Duty, Fortnite, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, among others. When prominent players followed me, other players saw this in their news feeds and followed me as well.
One of the things that I originally disliked about Twitter has actually turned out to be one of the things I like the most and one of the reasons why Twitter will likely endure as a major social media platform in the long-term. The annoyingly short maximum length of a Tweet may be frustrating at first, but it forces us to be concise and keeps our feeds clean with quick, easy-to-read information. What’s great about this is that it makes information and news readily accessible and can spread to more people due to the speed at which our posts can be posted and read. Additionally, if we really have to give more information than the character count of a Tweet provides, we can use Tweets as a way of prefacing a larger post and giving a link to an article or a website called TwitLonger, which allows us to link our audience to a longer post if necessary. I have seen many streamers use this to give an occasional long update for their fans about changing life paths or other very big news.
Another thing I love about Twitter is that it has allowed me to connect on social media with the more prominent gamers and content creators in my field because I’ve noticed that men in the industry are more likely to have only a Twitter and not both a Twitter and Instagram account. Most of the top players in my field are comfortable posting on Twitter, but not comfortable posting photos to Instagram, so their presence is heavily noted on Twitter whereas it’s absent on Instagram. Instagram is definitely more commonly used for female streamers and is almost expected/demanded that we update it with attractive selfies in order to remain relevant, but this can backfire if we don’t also use Twitter, since we’d be missing out on a larger demographic.
Twitter can definitely be used as a news broadcasting network, since it presents information in such a quick fashion. Politicians are now making frequent use of Twitter, and Donald Trump was one of the first to make the most impactful use of the platform. Twitter is going to be an enduring form of news because it is so easily accessible to anyone regardless of demographic, yet it can also reach sub-audiences through its algorithms and hashtags. I love Twitter because it has connected me with so many people and also allowed me to see breaking news that is relevant to the game that I play that is posted so much faster than waiting for articles on Wowhead or other official WoW-related websites. I look forward to seeing how I can continue to use Twitter for my personal brand, networking, and where the platform goes in the future.
VITAMINPEE 