Twitter Threads and Blogging

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Twitter threads and blogging are both free but whereas with one you need to click to read the continuation and it’s hard to print the other is self contained and easily shareable.

I see twitter threads, that as twitter threads are a waste of time on a conversational channel but would be ideal for a blog post. Imagine that you combine two or three tweets. That length would justify a blog post.

Blog posts can be of any length but ideally they should be three hundred words or more. In the case where a twitter thread has three or more points it would perfectly justify a three or more paragraphs post.

With a blog post you can source and give examples of the point you are trying to make and you are not limited to a specific number of characters. You don’t need to run a sentence from one tweet to the other.

You can also add images, documents and more and add headings and more. If you often feel the desire to write threads you could even take up blogging again.

Your blog posts can be written with a mobile phone at any time of day or night and from anywhere. I mention this because with the unreliability of newer Mac book pros mobile phones become a more tempting proposition.

I deleted twitter from my mobile phone because the signal to noise ratio is so high that it is no longer a social tool. It is used like RSS and the conversation is uni-directional. Do you really want your train of thought to compete in such a noisy environment?

The blogosphere is just as noisy as twitter but with one key difference. People who read blog posts are looking to invest their time rather than scroll mindlessly. We might as well take advantage of that.

I saw an image on Facebook that said that we need to keep our social media appropriate for good mental health. I’m suggesting that we take it a further step and skip social networks like Facebook and twitter and start conversing via blog posts again. Let’s re-allocate the time that we devoted to social media to self owned blogs and platforms where we go to learn, share and be creative.

I still love blogging because the aim and the challenge is to find just one idea to write about daily. It’s easy to write 20 tweets and post twenty thoughts a day to Facebook. It’s much harder to write one blog post a day. The challenge is good. We gain in creativity, self discipline and focus.

Next time you’re tempted to write a twitter thread stop yourself and write a blog post. It will take the same amount of time but your audience will be more engaged, eventually. Give your ideas the treatment they deserve.