Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [94]
Searching for topics of interest
Conversations crop up all the time on Twitter, so if you want to see what people are saying about something you’re interested in, search for it.
Say that you’re a huge cupcake fan and want to connect with other pastry buffs, so you want to see what people are saying. You can do this simply by running a Twitter Search for cupcakes. (We cover Twitter Search in detail in Chapter 9.)
Figure 12-2 shows a sample search for cupcakes. A recent search result, “about to bake cupcakes!<3<3” depicts a woman who seems excited at the prospect of making her cupcakes (those <3 characters are meant to be little sideways hearts showing how she loves cupcakes). By way of starting a conversation, you @reply to her, “I’m about to make cupcakes as well! What’s your favorite recipe?” The two of you can go from there and may happen to start a relationship about your mutual love for baking cupcakes. The fancy name for this is social object theory — the idea that two people who discover a common interest are more likely to form some kind of direct connection to one another because of their connection to (and feelings for) the shared interest. Put differently, a whole lot of what goes on on Twitter is about “What do we have in common?” more than it is about “What are you doing?”
Or maybe you find the prospect of maple cupcakes intriguing. That user seems like a great person to ask for a recipe if you want to make them, too!
While you’re going through the public timeline or the search results to find people who have information you want or people with whom you want to interact, you might feel tempted to try to direct message them. However, direct messaging works only if the person is following you. And because, in all likelihood, you haven’t talked to them yet, they’re probably not following you. Start a conversation by replying to them directly, for example: “@AliciaSue8 hey! Hey you! Maple cupcakes sound fantastic! Where’d you find that recipe?”
On Twitter, you‘ll find yourself getting to know people a lot better than you expected. Because Twitter profiles link to other resources and relevant information on their profile owners, you can get a pretty good sense of who people are. So, Twitter-based relationships often transition into relationships in real life. (Or, as some techies abbreviate it, IRL.)
Figure 12-2: Searching for cupcakes.
Twitter-based events
Through conversations on Twitter, many smaller communities have cropped up. The Twitter-based community occasionally organizes meet-ups in real life — the common thread being that they’re all part of a community from Twitter. As with nearly every term relating to Twitter, it should come as no surprise that these meet-ups are sometimes referred to as tweetups.
Because Twitter is just another medium by which people connect, and because the medium allows you to easily build relationships, you may not see meeting offline as such a stretch. In our experience, because Twitter connections are based on trust within a community (which you can measure by seeing who people talk to, what they say, and what they’re like), meeting people offline doesn’t feel as taboo as it used to.
In fact, because Twitter makes reaching out to new people so easy, some people have had great success in meeting people in the most random of places — for example, in between flights during a layover.
Say that you’re traveling from New Jersey to Colorado with a layover