Not Just a Granny

14.  Everyone on Twitter is looking for the next big thing or most interesting piece of content to link to.  Wouldn’t you rather be the big thing than merely another person pointing at it? – via @jeffbullas

I have enjoyed and toyed with Twitter since I first signed up in December 2008, not expecting the journey to be so much fun and so transformational.

For the first few months I sent the occasional tweet, connected with a few friends and watched the stream pass by, at the time I often said “I don’t know what to say”.

Then suddenly I started to really get into the swing of things, connecting with people from around the world, enjoying ‘chat’s, being as inventive as I could with my 140 character ‘tweets’.  I learned about #ff aka #followfriday, #traveltuesday and about #trending topics.

I spent hours following links and reading about places and finding out things I never knew existed.  In fact I have since become quite addicted….I could seriously live on twitter; all day!   I often tell my daughter I was born to twitter! 🙂 and along the way I have ‘met’ some wonderful people, and consider them great online friends.

In March 2009 I started this blog inspired by the content, search engine optimisation, social media inspiration and evangelism provided by Hubspot.  I already had a blog which I started in November 2008, where I wrote about my travels and things that inspired me, although since starting this blog I have been very slack about keeping it up to date.

I then waded in a bit deeper and started to use tools and apps like TweetDeck and Bit.ly, Social Oomph, Hootsuite and Ping.fm to integrate with Twitter.  I started to follow the ‘experts’, reading as much as possible on what they call Social Media.

I have since become quite the ‘geek’ as my daughter puts it and have my favourites to follow eg @jeffbullas @chrisbrogan @mashable @marismith (facebook expert) and @sethgodin (squidoo & tribes) amongst others.  I have learned so much that my brain bursts with info; info that pops out from time to time and amazes me that I know that stuff 🙂

One of my favourite tweeters/bloggers to follow is @jeffbullas and I have gained invaluable knowledge from reading his posts, some of which are incredibly funny.  His blog posts are informative, useful and educational.  I read voraciously.  He also advocates the blog before twitter aspect of social media, so of course…I listened to the teacher….

…and have subsequently become quite the blogger.  I now have 5 blogs, some more active than others, and 6 twitter accounts.  I also run 3 facebook accounts!  How bizarre!  Consider this:  10 years ago it was all I could do to send an email, and now just over 18 months later……..

I guess I have learned my lessons well; today to my absolute delight, I was asked by an online community in Richmond if they could feature my latest blog on Twickenham!!  Thanks to all my teachers.