App of the Week: ShowYou

I am challenged.

Just ask Ann.

I have had an account since completing 23 Things in 2010, but I rarely used it. Ann, however, is a master at Twitter, and has encouraged me to jump back into the stream...


Maribel Castro is another Twitter-inspiration. At each presentation I've attended, she mentions Twitter and its value to her professionally. She recognizes that we all have our preferred social media (I am a Facebook person, Maribel is not.) At her last presentation, she confessed to being Prezi-challenged, and shared that she commits herself to learning a new technology each month.


So I am committing myself to mastering Twitter. I can do the basics: log on, follow, read posts.... and I even post myself, although most of my posts come via Scoop.it! But there are two challenges I need to overcome:

I need to learn the language

Twitter is a foreign language in which I am not yet fluent. Most posts look like a bunch of gibberish with all the #'s and @'s and URL's. My 10-year-old daughter, in an effort to help, added Justin Bieber to my feed. Dare I admit that this teenager's plain-language tweets are the most intelligible easiest to read (yet irrelevant) of all I receive???

I need to learn to Tweet effectively

Time saver or time waster? How do YOU handle the non-stop stream of tweets? I tried using HootSuite, which is a good app, but left me deafened in a cacophony of tweets. For a time, I avoided Twitter completely because the tweets from colleagues read as a list of links... links that I feared would take me on too many bird walks (no pun intended) to be a productive use of my time.

Showyou to the rescue!

While it has not reduced ALL my Twitter anxiety, Showyou has simplified a great portion of the links I receive. Showyou delivers of all the videos my contacts post in Twitter and Facebook, and it allows me to browse through thumbnail clips of them, taking some of the guesswork out of which links to pursue. There is even an option to follow other Showyou users, which I have not yet experimented with.

 

  What are YOUR Twitter survival strategies?

I have a prize to mail out for the most helpful tip/comment I receive by the end of the working day, 5:00 CDT, Monday, June 11. 
(Anonymous comments do not qualify. Sorry.)