Get a Grip on Twitter Handles

Great, Belinda, glad the byline treatment works for you. The responsive themes from WordPress do have some coded functionality that can get something past you, so your making the right move to use the inputs available to show your handle on your own. Appreciate you reading and commenting -
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Excellent, @PCZick! Glad you find the approach useful, I think you’ll quickly note how much more easily you go from one platform to another with this helping make you “fluent.”
All the best with it!
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You catch on fast, Adam (and you have a great last name, lol). Smart move.

And if you use business cards, letterhead stationery, etc., be sure your Twitter handle goes onto those, as well — even those Old World items can carry your new-media connetions for you.

Thanks for reading the column and commenting!
-p.

Good for you, Cherry!

Remember, the whole thing is like a language in another way: You learn it one word at a time. Go at your own pace. Get the Twitter handles of a few friends so you can send messages back and forth. In time, you’ll begin to catch on to how it all works. It’s actually quite simple, there are very few things to truly learn. (French is much harder than Twitter-ese!)

The best advice I have is never think about “the whole thing.” Just peck along, a tweet at a time. Send one out, see what happens. If you don’t understand why it happened (or didn’t), don’t be afraid to ask. In the online world, requesting assistance is common and, in most cases, you’ll get it, folks are often flattered to be asked.

Started on a refurbished German manual Olympia typewriter, myself, had a beautiful font (typeface) I’ve found nowhere since.

Thanks for reading and commenting!
-p.

Sure thing, Lindsay, thanks for reading and commenting!

Hi, Jill, thanks for commenting.

Everything — from your church group to your beta-reading friends, your volleyball team, and your daycare parents’ buddies — becomes an echo chamber if you don’t press the edges of your experience there to let in unexpected and unfamiliar interests.

On Twitter, simply following someone you don’t know opens a new window that leads to more and more new people and ideas — the person may turn out to be a dud or may turn out to be a life-changer. But echo-chambering is never inevitable. In fact, this is why a lot of such online experience is called a “rabbit hole” … you find yourself led along by one new thing after the next. Quite the opposite of an echo chamber.

It just takes a bit of effort to be sure you’re keeping your options open.

Really appreciate your reading and commenting, thanks so much, and good weekend!
-p.

Hi, Monica.

Yeah, my own strong preference is for a Twitter handle to reference your name, not a project or product. This gets back to the point of crediting writers, too: Your blog won’t be writing — you will.

So you do the logic test.

(a) Has a girl’s eye view of everything ever written anything? No.
(b) Have girls written girls’ eye views of things? Forever.

There’s your answer. People write. Things (like your blog) do not. And partly because of the brevity of tweets, people need to write that you (not your blog) wrote so-and-so. They don’t have room to explain in a tweet why they’re referring to a person (you) as your project (your blog). So folks trying to tweet your work are instantly in a bind.

And, per an earlier comment I was answering, a bit more about why your Twitter handle, in general, needs to reflect your name:

First, people simply like to deal with people. In daily life, you wouldn’t dream of walking up to John Grisham and saying, “Hi, The Firm, how are you today?” And yet, somehow on Twitter, some folks think they should adopt a title or corporate name as their handle.

Second, your career as a serious writer is likely to have several, if not many, major projects to which you may attach “branding” from one time or another — new book titles, maybe new blog titles, etc., all should be coming along. If you’ve built up your following to know you by one or the other project/blog/book name, then when you need to present them with your great *new* project/blog/book, the old name makes a lot less sense.

Your name is what will always be with you, and, as in daily life, it’s what you’re called regardless of your job or role in various situations.

So I’d favor getting set up with a Twitter handle that makes the least tricky, most memorable, and most easily spelled use of your name as possible.

And all the best with it! Thanks for reading me and commenting –
-p.

Hey, Nikki!

So glad this was helpful, and that’s super that you now are doing a byline with your Twitter handle included!

I’ve realized that bylining, itself (“bylining” is not approved by Merriam-Webster, it’s just a newsroom corruption, lol), doesn’t come naturally to a great many people who haven’t worked in journalism.

One great thing it helps do is credit you when some of your work shows up elsewhere. Let’s say you write a guest post for someone who’s terribly well-intentioned but has a weird, awkward way of letting readers know a guest has taken over. This way, with a byline, there’s never any question whose work we’re reading. AND with the Twitter handle, we can all tweet your work so it gets some legs on it.

Good for you, then, and put a Post-It somewhere to remind you to do that each time. Soon it will be second nature.

A bientot -
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