Steve L. Edwards

One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that life presents you with plenty of opportunities to say “I was wrong.” This week was another of those moments, so to start things off, let me get it out of the way: when it comes to Twitter, I was wrong.

When Twitter first came onto my RADAR, it was through my day job as a Systems Architect. One of my company’s owners was excited about the prospect of “Social Media” and every buzzword associated with it. I gave Twitter a cursory glance and even created an account before I quickly dismissed it as yet another fad that would be forgotten as fast as Snuggies and Sham-Wow. Some stranger’s postings about what they had for dinner or that they managed to burp the alphabet for desert wasn’t appealing to me. 

I spent enough time on Twitter to start following one of my favorite authors–he actually had things to say that were amusing (@TheAuthorGuy will keep you laughing). But it wasn’t until this week that the true power of Twitter hit me in the face.

In my ongoing quest for an agent, I stumbled across a reference to the hashtags: #kidlitchat and #yalitchat. Now for the Twitter skeptics like I was, a hashtag is a Twitter’s way of adding context to your 140 character blurts. I thought I’d give it a try myself by posting a question related to finding an agent to those “topics”, then I sat back to see what happened.

Within 15 minutes I had received a flood of encouragement, a series of suggestions, and a ToDo list that I’m only now starting to wrap my head around, from all over the country. Within an hour I was “tweeting” back and forth with other authors (both accomplished and beginning like me), and some very kind people in the industry (Georgia and the rest of you, you’re all angels, thanks for the pointers!). The next day I was included in a #FF tweet (I know, what the heck? I looked it up, it stands for FollowFriday. It’s a tweeter’s way of saying “Here are some people you may want to follow,” a form of a Twitter introduction).

Twitter isn’t just about 140 character random blurts. It’s about connecting with other people, who have something in common with you and don’t mind sharing the path with a stranger. A single sentence with context takes on a whole new meaning. In the twitter world, hashtags provide that context.

To horribly misquote the Monkees: “Hey, I’m a tweeter now!”

For a interesting article on author’s hashtags, try this article: http://www.neonjade.com/index.php/2009/08/twitter-hashtags-for-writers/