How to win friends and influence people on Twitter

September 28, 2023 5:29 PM

I am very late to the Twitter game indeed, but have been recently set on fire to play harder after recent events in Canada. As background, I use a cel phone to make phone calls, and more recently to take photos and listen to music: I don't try and type on that thing at all. And the notion of restricting a thought to an arbitrary 156 characters is poisonous to thought itself in my estimation.

I started reflexively retweeting everything I thought worthy when Trump got elected, but my frustration with the platform has only grown, but I am now interested in trying to build some sort of network there, certainly there are some worthy correspondents there.

In particular, I have had cause to send messages to other users, even requests from them to do so - how do you even do that? It seems that they may have to 'follow' you - then how does that come about? Do I tweet at them and beg to be their friend? Something else?

Thanks for advice here (and praise be to Metafilter, where this all makes perfect sense).

posted by not_that_epiphanius to Computers & Internet (19 answers total)

Speaking as someone who once had quite a large Twitter platform, please leave X as soon as possible unless you are an Elon Musk fan, a crypto influencer, or a right-wing windbag. The platform is no longer designed for a mass userbase, its sole purpose at this point is to reassure Musk that he has all the right opinions and has his finger on the pulse of the global intellectual elite. It is now useless for making any kind of political impact because it has been redesigned specifically to privilege a specific set of viewpoints. You will not change anyone's mind. If you need the dopamine from engagement with your posts, find another social network. This is not a place of honor.
posted by derrinyet at 5:50 PM on September 28, 2023 [49 favorites]

I'm a Twitter long-timer. Don't have a ton of followers, but the ones I do have are solidly within my industry, and thus I've leveraged my Twitter presence to support and grow my freelance career.

Having said that? You're basically asking us about how to get on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. The place is going down rapidly. It'll either fail or be shut down altogether when Elon tires of it, or the exodus of most of the decent folks will leave it nothing more than a morass of Musk-stans, racists, conspiracy theorists, antisemites, "I'm just asking" bros, etc. It's already mostly that, though there are some people in my niche, for example, who are trying to hold on. (Most of the people in my niche seem to have moved to Bluesky. For now I'm present on both, but I rarely post/like on Twitter nowadays.)

I judge this partially on what I see with my own eyes, and partially on the fact that I don't know a single human who pays for the service. And almost every ad I've been served for at least six months is from a company I've never heard of. (The nominal CEO was recently saying that 90% of the advertisers are back, but I take that to mean the 90% who are crypto, trash shipped from China, etc...and Amazon.)

How to send a message to someone? Click on their name which will take you to their page. Look for the envelope icon and click that. If they don't have one, they have messages blocked and/or they require you to be mutual friends. I don't know the nuances of how this is currently working but this was the gist in the past.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:24 PM on September 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

When I first started using Twitter, I sought out YouTube videos with instructions. I don't have specific recommendations right now, but there are some good ones that will give you the basics.

My guess is that people who think Twitter is just dumpster fires and Nazis are writing from their own limited experience with whom they follow or reading work by journalists who follow other journalists as well as the crazies. Twitter is still an absolute godsend for people with my rare cancer. It is where the top specialists share important research papers as well as critiques of those papers and where they raise important issues in oncology, including issues of access. It is extremely civil - there are disagreements, but people are kind to each other. I follow a very limited number of people - oncologists, writers, and a number of people of faith - and I also have a general rule of unfollowing anyone I think is mean, even people I generally agree with - so Twitter is still a good experience for me. (And I won't be surprised if my comment saying this gets flagged and deleted.)

However, it sounds like you are planning to be political, so YMMV of course.
posted by FencingGal at 6:38 PM on September 28, 2023 [9 favorites]

Response by poster: "please leave X as soon as possible..."

I am fully aware of Musk's influence, and refuse to even call it "X", but I have encountered several incredible writers in the past few days, so happenstance is that it has been good to me in this disastrous week for Canada.

FTR, there is no means I am aware of to change anyone's mind ever on any platform including the sidewalk. Not being ungrateful here, I appreciate you are trying to look after me, and I appreciate that.

I guess I have struck up some good conversation as the ship goes down, and am maybe trying to get phone numbers etc, in hopes of rescue to torture the metaphor.

I should have been clear that my use is not professional, but personal / political and I simply amplify people I like and mute the rest.

I'd still don't understand how to engage one of my liked posters there in private messages, so I'll check back.

Thanks for all the helpful responses so far.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 6:58 PM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I was always surprised at people who seemed to like or even thrive on it, and was mystified when journalists talked about 'going to Twitter to check the news', like: why wouldn't you go to the news to check the news, Twitter is a stream of shit, not 'the news'.

Nonetheless I seemed to have found flecks of gold in the shit stream this week, in the form of informed and clever writers, who I would like to correspond with, and I don't understand technically how to turn the uni-direction stream into a conversation somehow. Others seem to have done this, but I don't see how.

There is zero chance I will be paying for it (time to send a few more $ to Metafilter...), and I will try not to invest emotionally based on my recent good luck with finding some like minded (but better!) writers.

The videos idea here is the most practical one, however my strong preference for text over video causes me to seek other help.

Thanks again.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 7:15 PM on September 28, 2023

Best answer: If you click on their profile and see the DM icon (a little envelope) you can message them. If you don't, you can't. That's about their settings, not yours, so you can't do anything about it other than let them know the site won't let you message. Maybe if they want to talk to you badly enough they'll change their settings, maybe not.

If you want someone to follow you your options are either to follow them and regularly engage with them in the hopes they'll decide they want to get to know you better, or to just tweet at them and ask them to follow you. The latter may not go over very well but I'm sure it depends on the specific people and topics you're engaged in.
posted by Stacey at 7:16 PM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I think that's it, Stacey! I had not understood this is how it 'works'.

Thanks for confirming my general impression that Twitter is not designed to build community, in fact the opposite is true. I have always hated it, just been surprised that anyone felt differently, not to mention half a billion people.

The answer is 'I can't' and I will have to live with that.

Cheers,

n_t_e
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 7:19 PM on September 28, 2023

Mastodon (see, e.g., this particularly venerable server) seems to be attracting an increasing number of interesting people. It may be worth exploring. It is designed to build community. (Disclaimer: I do not have a Mastodon account; I merely read it through the web interface from time to time.)
posted by heatherlogan at 7:45 PM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

You want to correspond with them, but do they want to correspond with you? This is a social challenge more than a technical one. The best way to get clever and informed people to engage with you on twitter is to write clever and informed things yourself. Accounts that reflexively retweet things are often not that enjoyable to follow. That said, you don't need to DM people to talk to them, you can usually just reply to their tweets publicly.
posted by umwelt at 9:35 PM on September 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

From 2016, "Twitter's missing manual" (a long blog post about how to use the site).
posted by brainwane at 9:38 PM on September 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

I agree with Umwelt: "you don't need to DM [Direct Message] people to talk to them, you can usually just reply to their tweets publicly." Mostly when people refer to community and rich conversations that happen on Twitter, that's what they're referring to: one person posts an initial tweet, another person selects that tweet and chooses the "reply" option to offer a public response, and the conversation goes on from there.

If you need to privately say something to someone, and they've set their settings so that only people they follow are allowed to Direct Message them, you have the option of publicly replying to them and saying something like: "Hi! I'd like to send you a brief DM about [topic]; may I ask you to please temporarily follow me?" And this will be more likely to succeed if you have previously said interesting and congenial things on Twitter, especially in replies to their own tweets.
posted by brainwane at 9:45 PM on September 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

Please note that for popular tweets with lots of replies, the algorithm now sorts it so that paid subscribers are always top replies, so it's way harder for intelligent responses to get interactions. I've stopped reading replies because the top pile are now always inane Musk-allied viewpoints.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:19 PM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Frequent twitterer since late 2018 (primarily for work) - via my wife who is a very serious user - mainly theology & colour. I've met great people, inc. IRL. In NZ it's still very useful - but is becoming poisonous as our right wing are deSantis associates and flooding it with bots & vileness, a lot of functionality is falling away.

It' i's hard to use initially like search, and a lot of functionality is poorly documented ime:
Search:
https://twitter.com/search-advanced? [a useful box comes up]
can also do that on the address bar like:
https://twitter.com/search-advanced? perl5 lang:en [to only see English]

@ting others into your tweets helps show people you're interested in them, as is hashtagging topics. A succinct bio helps too.

I've found twitter really good for finding; ecologists, theologians, land-artists, landscape people, alt musicians, artists and climate science/activists - many of these probably have a high threshold for the arrrgh and are hanging around. What you se is largely, ime, driven by what you link to, who you follow.

I've 'treasured my time on it and it's improved my very short form writing writing immensely - I do a lot of CAD and write a ton of unique prose labels - my labels are now very succinct and I write them faster.

I have set up a Mastodon, blogging more and hoping twit won't die completely.
posted by unearthed at 12:53 AM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

And the notion of restricting a thought to an arbitrary 156 characters is poisonous to thought itself in my estimation.

Microcontent is not for you? Twitter and other similar platforms are all about sharing a single thought at a time. Just like tiktok and Instagram are about sharing visual content. It's not poisonous to thought to express things either concisely or visually. The problems with any (all?) given social media platform generally relate to ownership, moderation and monetisation all of which are entirely independent of the format used.
posted by plonkee at 4:09 AM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ps, the movie I referred to is Zola. Writer Aziah “Zola” King got a movie deal based on telling a wild (and presumably true) road trip story in a Twitter thread of 148 tweets, which is basically the length of any movie outline.

But movie outlines are usually a bit dry, and King’s tweets were not only structured like a real plot, they were ALSO written in a gripping, vivid, and hilarious way (note that some people are not familiar with or impressed by the dialect of English she writes in, but if that’s what makes you think it’s not sophisticated writing, there’s a word for that too).

I know screenwriters and we all wish we could write anything as incandescent as Aziah King’s massively viral tweet thread.

It takes skill to be good at Twitter. It’s not about the medium, it’s about the writer.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 5:16 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Comment removed. Please stick to answering the question instead of attacking the original poster.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:50 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I despise Musk and am not sad that he's lost billions on his Twitter adventure. There is still a ton of great content and I will keep harvesting some to re-post. MeFi-mailing you so I can follow you.
posted by theora55 at 8:56 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you so much for these most recent comments, I now understand how some people have made the most of Twitter: it's just been this week that my reflexive process of "like, retweet, repeat" has turned into making some friends there, for the first time since I created my account in 2009.

I really couldn't figure out how some people got so much out of it, and I can say that even in these days, this it is still possible to do so. I think I will start a curation process next - after checking out the very helplful links posted here. So many "best" answers!

I do see the value of the discipline side of a single thought, tho I find it is ungainly when you'd like to have more than that (and see that Musk has broken this for paying customers anway).

I happened to have taken a hiatus from Mefi, after scanning through ALL the Trump threads for the first year or so - it feels good to be back!
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 7:56 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: One other thing on sending DMs. As someone already said, it's based on the other person's settings. In my experience, most people's settings allow DMs from people they follow and not from anyone else.

Which brings me to your next question, how do you get a particular person to follow you? What I've done is like, retweet, or reply to one or two of their tweets and then I follow them. Sometimes they'll follow back, but it depends on the person and how they use Twitter. If they have a lot of followers they're less likely to follow someone who has a small account. In that case I would suggest following them and then engaging with their tweets over a period of time, reply with interesting comments, hope they see them, and eventually they might follow you. And if they reply to your replies, you can build from there. First they have to notice you, then they need a reason to follow you, then you can DM them (if their settings allow).

You said you are "now interested in trying to build some sort of network there." If you want to build a network of people that you've discovered and find interesting, I think that's doable. OTOH, if you want to build a following of people who discover you, that's harder, especially now. Prior to the recent changes, I observed some non-public people (not journalists, writers, or academics, not in politics) build a very large following and I could see that it was very hard work and took years of consistent tweeting. It's much harder to get noticed now because the algorithm favors people who are paid subscribers.

As someone else said, the algorithm also favors paid subscribers in the replies. So you're more likely for a person to see your reply if the tweet only has a handful of replies.
posted by daikon at 8:49 PM on September 29, 2023