By Tatiana of A Very Good Year. Follow her @averygoodyear.
“Hi honey,” the MSN message read. “I can’t figure out this Twitter thing. Are you on here?”
I like to think of myself as a fairly web-savvy person. I blog at my own domain. I would marry Google if it were an actual person and not a web empire. I’m part of numerous social networking and bookmarking sites, I participate in forums regularly, and I’ve been browsing the internet since it was nothing more than green text on a black screen on my Tandy. So when my mother, who finally signed up for Facebook in March, sent me this message, it was a shock: she had gotten a Twitter account before me.
Before Oprah.
Before the whole Ashton and CNN hooplah, even.
All I knew of Twitter was that Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn) used it as an integral part of his show, and no way would I fall into his trap, his web of Twitter fanboys and fangirls. And really, isn’t Twitter just like eternally updating your Facebook status? Why would I want to do that?
Clearly I didn’t “get it.”
But my mom did.
I realized that if my mom’s beat me to it, I’m very behind the times. I signed up for an account and sent out my first tweet:
Months behind? More like years behind.
Now I tweet religiously. Although so many articles on this site focus on how to use Twitter to improve your professional image or promote your business, I’ve found its greatest strength to be very simple: it allows me to chit-chat with people that I don’t get to see every day, or even every month.
In February 2009, I became a mother. Anyone who’s gone through life with a newborn knows how isolating it can be, particularly for the parent who is staying at home with the baby all day. In my case, that’s me. While I wouldn’t change that for the world, I find that I easily end up feeling disconnected from my peers. Twitter provides an easy, time-efficient connection to other moms, including my own, who know what it’s like to be in this situation. These women provide me with inspiration, laughter, and feedback.
Any time day or night, there’s a mom out there communicating on Twitter. She could be tweeting about her son’s newest milestone, her body image issues, or just that she forgot to thaw something for dinner, and I can respond. 140 characters at a time, in those brief moments when our children occupy themselves or nap, we foster a relationship. I can ask others for advice about soothing a cranky baby, curing diaper rash, or which baby carrier suits my needs, and someone out there is answering.
Now, getting back to my mom: she lives 500 miles away from us. We’re lucky to get to visit her twice a year. She can access Twitter from work though, so we’re able to talk at a leisurely pace throughout the day. Services like 12seconds.tv and TwitPic allow me to share all the random, cute things her granddaughter is doing with her. We don’t have to arrange a time for a phone call just to have it interrupted by the baby. We can’t be on Skype with one another all day, but I can still share my daughter’s life with her via a stream of content.
No, I may not be on my way to becoming the next great Twitterati, but I am staying connected with my family, and making new friends. I’m creating a social network. Who knows — maybe someday, one of them will help me out in my professional life, and it’ll be because during some hazy morning hour, we bonded over nursing our babies.