George Taylor McKnight

Twitter Swap Confession

For the last five weeks @kkaitlynreedd and I switched Twitter accounts as a bit of a social experiment.

Not a single thing on @gtmcknight came from me, yet my follow numbers not only continued to grow but even the CEO of Twitter started following me.

Who You Follow
Kaitlyn and I follow pretty different crowds. Besides my personal friends, I follow a bunch of tech/music nerds. She follows bands and a few famous people. I began reading people I didn’t know anything about and quickly learned quite a lot about them.

One of the fun parts was getting together and asking each other questions about our followers or proudly showing off bits of gossip that we had learned about each other’s friends.

I discovered the power of Twitter that can take somebody from stranger (that I’m not even interested in or followed on my own account) to the feeling of kinship.

Who Follows You
We didn’t make all that much effort to hide the swap. She kept tweeting about the things that interested her and I did the same. I posted things like Limewire’s debt, what beers I was drinking and what music I liked. Neither of our followers seemed to notice.

The only person that hit me up in real life, knowing that tweets about Justin Bieber and Eclipse weren’t my style was my old roommate @bwc.

I also learned it’s way easier to go from 1300 to 1350 than 80 to 100. It was toughhh attempting to get her over the follower milestone (I tried to follow/tweet people I thought would enjoy what she wrote about usually not me).

Oversharing Culture
There were quite a few moments where I REALLY wanted to share cool things going on in my life with my followers. Music I wanted to recommend or that crazy stripclub I was at in New Orleans. It was good for me to break that (what had become) instinctual need to share share share.

That said, I still got it out of my system usually by posting photos to Tumblr/Facebook so it was an entire digital ‘sharing cleanse’.

Anyway, I’m excited to be back on @gtmcknight now.