Twitter: Doing It for Fun, Or Doing It for Money

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I haven’t been on Twitter for very long. Technically, I’ve had two accounts since 2013, but I didn’t really start using them until 2019. Even then, I haven’t gone all in yet. I think it’s because of the shift in my focus over the years.

I first became aware of Twitter in 2008. I was working as a full time security guard and a part time pizza delivery driver. I was also on My Space, and transitioning over to Facebook. I really liked the idea of Twitter though. There was something about the idea of trying to say something in only 140 characters. You kids today with your fancy 280 characters just don’t know how tough it was. Actually, I don’t even know how tough it was, which is my point.

I should have gotten involved, but I seriously would have had a Twitter account for the next eleven years and barely ever used it. I was lucky in some regards that I could never get internet out at my guard posts, because it pushed me to do other things. I did a lot of writing, reading, and various other things that didn’t really involve the internet. In some ways the guard job was ruined once I had a smart phone and could get onto the internet, or play stupid phone app games. That might have been the time when I should have got into Twitter, and it almost was.

This is where I finally get to the point of the title. When I finally got a Twitter account, it was because Nathan and I wanted to promote our Kickstarter. The problem is that I wasn’t really all that interested in being on Twitter just to essentially pre-sell something. I stuck with it while we had the Kickstarter going, but I abandoned it quickly after. I didn’t pick it back up when we did our next two Kickstarters.

In fact, for about three years I was super into something that was probably good for me at the time, but certainly wasn’t good for my Twitter aspirations. I was working a lot of overtime for Pizza Hut. At first, it was as a driver, but I got moved into a shift manager position. I may not have been the greatest employee ever, but I was reliable and willing to work. This meant I worked a lot. It was good for getting by for a bit.

I eventually left Pizza Hut and tried out Uber Eats for a little bit. It sucked. Don’t do it unless it’s seriously part time. Too many miles, not enough pay. During that time though, I had a little more freedom to write when I wanted to write. It pulled my head out of the mentality that working so much had caused. I started to be more creative again. It was at this point that I started thinking about Twitter again.

I imagine a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is that you only use Twitter to make money (which is what happened when I only had the account to try to promote the Kickstarter) and where 10 is that it’s just something that you do for the fun of it. I think that I’d be sitting at about a 7 or 8 on that scale at this point in my life.

The thing is that I write because I enjoy writing. The only reason that I want to make money from my writing is so that when I wake up I’m looking forward to sitting down and writing not going to deliver pizza. In a way, I’m using Twitter as a means to promote my writing and the According To Whim YouTube channel, but it’s more so because I want to finally get around to experiencing the fun of writing short thoughts, and talking to people about their short thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong. I have every intention of creating an income, but like I said, it’s more so that I have more time to do my thing. I watch the videos about how to gain followers. I watch the videos about earning a living on social media. It’s because I’m a writer though. I love the feeling of sitting down and typing out the thoughts. I hate the feeling when I don’t feel I have all that much to write either because I have to be to work soon or because I’m so tired after getting off of work.

A blog post like this will flow pretty easily if I have a good enough topic of discussion. Fiction writing doesn’t flow as well for me. I often need hours to write a couple of pages of fiction. Yet fiction is actually the form of writing I enjoy most. Most people don’t know me as a fiction writer, and that feels unfortunate to me. This may seem like I’m going off topic. I’m just trying to say that I’m not all that worried about the money, as much as I’m worried about the time that it could buy for me to write more fiction. If part of my Twitter time is trying to monetize my writing, then so be it. But I wouldn’t be using Twitter if that was my only motivation.

Chris McGinty is probably not even really known as a writer to most people. It’s funny how that works. It comes from not really self-promoting. All those dumb ideas about people discovering the writing. Oh well. Chris McGinty is a blogger. You know how I know? No, not because he told me (you’re not paying attention, are you?), because he has his whole week of blog posts scheduled at this point. And now to go to Twitter and tweet some abstract bullshit that no one will understand.