I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of mutuals (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a decent amount of high-quality interaction. On a new account with 0 followers, most people won't see you. Even if you reply to a popular tweet, most people will ignore your reply because of your low follower count.

I have two Twitter accounts: a pseudonymous one with a few hundred followers where I talk about my hobbies, and a professional one with a very low follower count where I talk about tech.

The first account is a lot of fun - I can post about something and 5-10 of my Twitter friends (people with shared interests who I only know via Twitter) will chat with me about it. The professional one is giving me the experience you're describing. A couple coworkers follow me and a few random people, but not enough of an audience for anyone to see my tweets. It feels like a waste of time.

I consider it a design flaw that Twitter makes it so hard to get your account off the ground. Sites like HN and Reddit allow you to jump in the conversation on a fresh account, but on Twitter you're just invisible. I got my first account up and running thanks to some real-life friends following me, and I can't imagine how to make my professional account stand out.

twitter is a game. the main move is saying things that get a reaction. your score is the number of likes/responses/follows. getting follows let you get a bigger reaction.

> I have found this to be the biggest myth of Twitter: it is nearly useless for content marketing.

I've found Twitter to be essential to my business. Perhaps you're looking at it too "directly", in terms of traffic analysis. What's important in my opinion is "worth of mouth" advertising. You have a circle of friends on Twitter, your friends recommend your product to their friends, and so on. If your Twitter content is interesting and valuable, you might even get members of the media to follow you. Or at least members of the media might be following one of your followers and happens to see your product that way.

Twitter is the only major social network that I actually 'get'.

Instagram is great, but it only works if you take good pictures. You have to be pretty, or a photographer. It's super great for that, but minimum effort needed per post is high, so engagement sort of has to be low.

Reddit is great, but it's not really 'social' so much as it's a generic-access to monopolized forums. It feels like a catalog of phpBB forums from the 2000's. It's great for general knowledge stuff (if you are like, 'fan of videogame series' or 'long-time active in trains' or such, Reddit's great). But it doesn't feel social, I don't know anyone from reddit, I've never met a person from Reddit.

Facebook is bad, and is also too "real" (pretend real, Zuck's definition of real). If your personal persona, professional persona, immediately-family persona, and extended-family persona are all exactly identical, then Facebook seems great for you. Personally, I hate it, everything I post gets sent to my parents and grandma, and like half of my company org chart, which means I can't write anything real on there, even though ostensibly they are all my "friends". (Am I going to unfriend my work friends or my extended family?). Sure, you can 'scope' your posts, but then people can eventually tell they're scoped poorly and complained. And the people who are on there, are predominantly people full of terrible political views that no sane person should ever hold -- I do not want to have to spend every waking moment telling folks, "yes, humans should have rights. People are not property." and so on.

Twitter is pretty good. It's techie enough that my parents and grandma can't "get it", and aren't tempted to make an account. It's techie enough that most of my professional contacts are on there, but there's a cultural assumption that (as a tiny account with few followers) I can be my authentic self and not get completely in trouble. (I can say something like, "attending a Pride parade" and have that sit next to "released a new version of my cool rubygem" and not get in trouble professionally over it, or have my parents yell at me -- both real things that would 100% happen if I posted that same blurb on Facebook). There's no assumption of Twitter implying friendship (I can follow people I've never met, who I'm not 'friends' with) but close relationships can still grow without having to label it (I can be 'mutuals' with someone, without trying to imply they are my friend).

If your net is too wide, you can set up a private "alt" account and lock it, so your closer friends/contacts can see stuff that might otherwise get you in trouble with the broader community -- and since it's a different account, there's no assumption every follower of the one should see all of the other too (it gets around the facebook/scoping problem that way)

Twitter gives you a really good pulse about what people want to care about publicly which is useful information (so much as you don't mistake it for what people actually care about, or for the sum total of all they're thinking).

Generally speaking, Twitter is the only major Social Network that still feels...well, social.

I still don’t get it. Why would I want to talk to my friends in public? In a medium specifically designed to propagate out-of-context sound bites? Surrounded by trolls of all ideologies? I stopped posting anything on Twitter because there was nothing to say that’s worth the risk.