Tweet, Retweet, Repeat

Have you ever played the card game Spoons? The zealous nature of the game calls for a whirlwind of card passing—or really just slapping them down in front of your neighbor. It takes a trained eye to glimpse the cards in your growing pile and continue to pass the correct ones, while simultaneously watching the spoons in the center. You pass as swiftly as possible but still end up with too many cards to handle.

I found Twitter to be quite similar to Spoons. 

Today I combed through live feeds and directed my hashtag search to health, pediatrics, nutrition, neonatal health, and so on. With every live feed (this morning I did some research on #ZikaVirus), there seems to be an infinite number of posts per hashtag. Tweet, tweet, tweet. I did not think it would be difficult to read them: most are very short and concise—plus, I can just ignore the ones in German and Spanish. However, no matter how fast I read through tweets, there are always new results…2, 8, 17, 24… Even when I just glimpse at the posts, more and more appear at the top. 

So, tweeting from Marvin Medisoft’s page was interesting because my tweets were constantly buried under newer results. Newsworthy topics like raising awareness about zika encouraged many to join the live feed, and I learned that more active users tweeted incredibly often.

Additionally, I never really understood the power of Retweets. I can enhance information sharing without having to come up with an engaging title/tweet since someone else’s was already included. This makes it much easier to enhance awareness of a certain topic I want to share. 

This all seems pretty arbitrary and obvious for you current Twitter users (any “Duh” moments, anyone?), but as a newbie, I found it to be quite cool. 

More to come this week. 

Keep tweeting, and play some spoons while you’re at it.
Mia Lu