Social media can be the source of a real love/hate relationship for introverts.
On the one hand, you can reach a whole lot of people from the relative safety of your keyboard. You can take time crafting and perfecting a message. Awkward silences are significantly less painful.
On the other hand, though, you’re still putting yourself out there in front of a potentially enormous audience – and that means you’re in a position of serious vulnerability.
What if you share an update with a typo? Tweet the wrong thing? Get called out?
Commence cold sweat.
This is why Twitter can be paralyzing for an introvert.
After all, how do you manage the constant barrage of information? How do you effectively jump into conversations on such a fast-paced social network without getting lost in the noise?
Raise your hand if one of these reasons has ever held you back from Tweeting:
- Your insights didn’t feel original or creative enough
- You were worried someone might argue with or embarrass you
- Kinda made that point once in the past, and don’t wanna be a one-trick pony
- You were just about to, but whoops, looks like the moment passed
- What if nobody engages, that’d be so humiliating
We can’t actually see if you raised your hand, but the point is, it’s okay – and there are ways to work around feelings like this!
If you’ve ever felt a little introverted on Twitter and want to get better at putting yourself out there, this is for you.
What are some ways you can make both listening and sharing a lot simpler?
How can you build relationships, engage meaningfully in conversations, and even gain new clients and customers using an introvert’s sense of strategy?
Here are three simple tips that’ll reshape your experience!
Break down your timeline into lists
Twitter’s speed can make it pretty overwhelming.
How do you keep up with a timeline that’s updating with new stuff every few seconds? When you follow a few thousand people, jumping in with your own updates can feel about as inviting as sprinting into traffic.
By dividing up the people you follow into lists, though, you can make your timeline easier to follow – and conversations easier to join.
Create lists that break people down by category – what they Tweet about, what industry they’re in, and so on.
Run a local business? Put everyone you follow in your city on a list. Are you a writer with a penchant for sci-fi? Add your fellow genre lovers to a special list. You can create a list for anything – attendees at a particular event, people who inspire you, authors you love to read, and so on.
A list of a few dozen users is a lot easier to keep up with than a timeline with hundreds, or thousands – and it gives you more control over what sorts of conversations you’re paying attention to at any given time.
Just make sure that when you follow new people, you add them to the right list(s), too. If you’re diligent, you’ll almost never have to monitor an intimidating primary timeline again!
Choose a few Twitter chats
You already know that taking part in Twitter chats is a great way to grow your audience – but the idea of randomly joining a crowded conversation with hundreds of strangers might make your skin crawl just a little bit.
The reality, though, is that Twitter chats are more intimate than they sound – and that means the pressure to blow minds is a lot lower than you might expect.
Amy Schmittauer, author of Vlog Like a Boss and self-described introvert, nails the appeal of Twitter chats on her blog:
Twitter chats are the most wonderful thing. Instead of having a completely random conversation in the middle of the Twitterverse, you can sit down with a bunch of awesome people who have come together for the same subject matter and chat with them for about an hour.
Not so bad, right?
Twitter chats are short, focused conversations – often in a Q&A format – so you can pop in and out based on the subject. You can even use a tool like TweetChat to make following along easier by filtering out Tweets that aren’t part of the chat!
Follow along with a few Twitter chats throughout the week, and see which ones look like a good fit for you. (They generally recur on a weekly basis.) Participating even just a little can be an effective way to get in front of a new audience, and to demonstrate your expertise to people who might not have heard of you otherwise!
Take the pressure off by scheduling updates
The less you use Twitter, the harder it gets to make it a habit.
Because the less you use it, the more pressure you feel to make everything feel super worth sharing, right? It sets a standard that feels higher and higher the less active you are!
The solution isn’t to lower your standards and just Tweet for the sake of generating content.
The solution is to maintain a schedule of content you feel confident in – and scheduling it in advance makes that a lot easier.
Instead of putting pressure on yourself to come up with a fresh gem on the spot every time you want to Tweet, set aside time to write a handful of updates you’re proud of, and schedule them to be posted automatically.
When you have a steady stream of updates pre-written and scheduled, you can jump in and out of Twitter whenever you want – without the pressure of making up for lost momentum every time you’ve taken a break!
How do YOU manage Twitter as an introvert?
Yes, it’s counter-intuitive for us to ask introverts to speak up – but we want to know your tricks for making Twitter less intimidating!
Got any tools you use to manage the noise?
A favorite list?
A low-key Twitter chat you never miss?
Let us know in the comments!
