Twitter Humblebrag

First, a little background…

I got a Twitter account two or three years ago “just because”, but didn’t start using it on a regular basis until early 2013.

My initial opinion of Twitter when I first heard about it was low – just for use by teens to see what the latest gossip and BS was from the Kardashians and Justin Bieber. That opinion changed pretty quickly once I started using it regularly. It’s a tool, just like any other. Yes, you can use it to follow movie stars and bubble-brained airheads who are “famous for being famous”. You can also (as I do) follow:

• the New York Times
• CNN
• the Los Angeles Times
• NPR
• dozens and dozens of NASA accounts, including astronauts currently on ISS
• reporters covering astronomy and the space programs
• planetary scientists
• astronomers
• writers such as John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Seanan McGuire, Richard Kadrey, and Neil Gaiman
• musicians such as Amanda Palmer
• favorite sports teams and the beat reporters who cover them

You get the picture? There’s some absolutely amazing, creative, intelligent, and hilarious stuff going on there.

I am a long, long way from being a “big name” on Twitter by any stretch of the imagination. As of this last Wednesday morning, I had all of thirty-one people “following” my account.

I’m still enough of a novice and wannabe on Twitter so that I have all of my notification alarms turned on. This means that my phone goes “boop!” any time someone responds to, “favorites”, or “re-tweets” anything I tweet. It doesn’t happen often — two or three times a month might be a “big” month.

I occasionally will comment or react to some tweet or another, and on a handful of occasions I’ve gotten a response, a “favorite”, or a “re-tweet”. The “high point” of my “Twitter career” I think was when I once responded to a tweet by the NASA Morpheus Lander account and it got two or three “favorites” and maybe two “re-tweets”. I’ve gotten a couple of local LA television reporters to respond to tweets I’ve sent their way.

As they say, “Big whoop!”

Then came last Thursday night when I was busy writing my entry for Chuck Wendig’s “Flash Fiction Challenge”. As usual, my Twitter feed was up in a window on the other monitor. (I use the Janetter client most of the time on my desktop.) A bizarre little tweet caught my eye as it popped up:

Assault and attempted murder using a squirrel as a weapon, eh? There’s something you don’t necessarily see every day!

The Bloggess is a writer & entertainer who is followed by many of the people that I  respect and follow (three of whom you can see listed there), so I started following her some time back. She can be very entertaining, often in a really thoughtful and weird sort of way which I enjoy and respect. As you can see, she has many, many followers.

Now there’s a response that I like!

Apparently other followers of her were equally enamored.

I often find my muse slipping out and making snarky, snappy, (hopefully) witty comments in tweets that I shoot off into the Twitterverse. 99.999999% of the time they go ignored and unseen.

This was that 0.000001% event for me:

About thirty seconds after hitting “send” my phone went “boop!”. Then “boop! boop! boop!”. Then “boog!boop!boop!boop!boog!boop!boop!boop!” And it didn’t shut up for a while.

The Bloggess had “favorited” and “re-tweeted” my post to all of her 365,613 followers. They’re not all online every second watching every word she types, obviously, but a decent percentage of them are, and they seemed to think my tweet had an appropriate amount of snark, so they started responding, “favoriting”, and “re-tweeting”. Then The Bloggess started following my account (hi there!) and others did as well. (Am I supposed to be clever and funny all the time now? No pressure!)

The “boop!boop!” chorus subsided after a while, although there were a few more yesterday, and even a couple today. The current totals are:

I haven’t done an exact count (maybe Twitter has a stats function somewhere that I could check, but I don’t know where it is) but I would bet that the 10 “retweets” and 29 “favorites” on this tweet exceed all of the “retweets” and “favorites” combined on every tweet I’ve ever done. And the number of my followers jumped from 31 to 38, a 22% increase overnight.

Let me assure you, I’m not having any delusions of grandeur here. This is neither rocket science, brain surgery, or high finance.

On the other hand, one of the things I’ve done in the last year is to actively try to establish my “personal brand” using this blog and social media. That’s why I’ve set up accounts and been using Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram. I’ve been active on Facebook for years since it’s been extremely useful in keeping in touch with friends in SF fandom and high school classmates that have scattered all over the country. I keep seeing articles and advice that says that such a “personal brand” will serve you well in job hunting, particularly on LinkedIn. (Well, we see how well that advice has worked.)

If I am able to establish some sort of career as an author, either part-time or full-time, such a “personal brand” and a solid presence on social media will be invaluable. So when that happens, you can say you knew me when. “Yep, I read his ‘Twitter Humblebrag’ blog post when it first came out. I was one of Paul’s fans and readers before it was cool to be one of Paul’s fans and readers!”

No egoboo here — just me and my self-satisfied grin. (Don’t worry, The Long-Suffering Wife will knock me off of this pedestal I’ve erected for myself, probably immediately after she read this. In four, three, two, one…)