My Best & Worst Twitter Moments

As a social media junkie, you can safely assume that I’m a fan of Twitter. I first heard about the upcoming social network when I was a sophomore in college (so this is late 2008,  maybe early 2009), as my young female professor proclaimed her love for this new website. She told us that as students looking for a career in the communications field, we needed to be on Twitter. At the time, I certainly wasn’t even thinking about my post-college job, I had barely survived my freshman year of college for crying out loud!

But boy, was she right. Twitter exploded shortly thereafter, around my junior year of college (2010). At first, I was apprehensive about using the social network. I mainly followed celebrities, friends and people in the field of public relations, which was my major at the time. I mostly watched and listened and rarely tweeted anything of substance. When the time for networking, job searching and interning came around, I started to see more benefits of using it and became a true tweeter.

According to this fun site, my Twitter account was “born” on March 25, 2009. Since then, I’ve accumulated over 600 followers and tweeted almost 2,000 times. Pretty crazy to think about, right? Over the past few years of tweeting useless information and self-promoting my blog posts and unemployment status post-college, I’ve had some fun and not-so-fun interactions. So I thought I’d share with you some of my best and worst Twitter moments. I want to hear yours, too- so leave them in the comments!

My Best Twitter Moments

Joel McHale direct messaging me on Twitter to wish me a happy Twitter birthday. I mentioned this little gem of a site above, but Twbirthday is a website that shows you the date that you first signed up for Twitter. It also tells you who your Twitter “Godmother” or “Godfather” is, a.k.a. who the first person was that you ever followed on Twitter. Back in March of this year, I saw a tweet about this website and decided to try it out for myself. I then, of course, tweeted about it and included @joelmchale in my tweet. Now Joel is a big celebrity (he hosts The Soup on E! and stars in Community), so I never expected him to see the tweet, let alone respond to it. But he did- he sent me a direct message on Twitter saying “Happy Twitter Birthday”. Call me a nerd all you want, but I thought this was pretty cool.

My favorite band re-tweeting and following me. The Early November broke my little heart when they broke up back in 2007. Luckily for me and thousands of other fans, they reunited in 2011 and came out with a new album in 2012. In an effort to promote their new CD and create some buzz, they started spending some more time on Twitter interacting with fans. So when I tweeted about how excited I was to get my pre-order of “In Currents”, I was shocked to see them re-tweet it to their 6,000+ followers AND follow my account in return. Again, it may sound nerdy to you, but I was thrilled. Has your favorite band re-tweeted or followed you? I didn’t think so.

My favorite President offering this hilarious answer to my question. Ok, so I know this isn’t Abe Lincoln’s actual Twitter account, but it’s still hilarious to me. Not only do we share the same birthday (I’m a couple years younger than him), but honest Abe and I obviously share the same sense of humor. I asked him “Why are you so bad-ass?” and this is what he replied:

My Worst Twitter Moments

Accidentally favoriting other people’s tweets. Once Twitter decided to change their look last year, I noticed that I was constantly hitting the “favorite” button when browsing through my feed. Scrolling with my mouse (or on my phone) suddenly didn’t seem to safe anymore. The worst part is that I don’t realize that I’m doing this since I’m just scrolling through and only reading select tweets that I care about. I don’t find out that I’ve accidentally hit “favorite” until someone calls me out on it. Cue embarrassment. Luckily, it usually happens to a large brand or magazine account, so it’s not a big deal. However, I did receive a text from my friend Rob about it. He was excited that I had favorited one of his political tweets. I had to break his heart by telling him that this was in fact an accident and that I hated politics. Sorry, buddy. I’m sure the day will come when I favorite an old college classmate’s tweet about how their dog just passed away, I’m just waiting for it. So followers, just know that I’m not stalking your account and no, I don’t really want to favorite that tweet you sent to your BFF about last weekend. It just was on my feed and I accidentally clicked it.

Seeing people blatantly tweet about you. I like to think that I’m smarter than the average girl person. I understand how things work on the Internet and social media. I’m also not stupid and can realize when people are tweeting things that are obviously about me. Maybe they did it on purpose to get a rise out of me, or maybe it’s their catty way of making themselves feel better. Or maybe they think I became blind and can’t see it. Well my eyes work fine and it stinks to see people write nasty things about you to others. Luckily, I know I’m a caring, funny and smart person so at the end of the day I just have to shake it off.

Witnessing awkward Twitter moments. Technically this would be filed under the “best” Twitter moments for me since I get a real good laugh out of it, but it is certainly awkward and bad for those Twitter accounts involved. As a graduate of Marist College, I follow one of their alumni group accounts. A lot of times they will send out a shoutout to their newest followers in their tweets. This one below stood out to me. Someone clearly didn’t read the names of the tweet before sending it out.