How Social Networking Got Me All Sexed Up – Sort Of

Second only to Facebook, Twitter is massive. Ironically shorter is better, because the social networking site which limits your character count in tweets, averages between 400 to 600 million of those 140 character or less thoughts.

Thankfully, Twitter gave us the ability to filter our tweets using lists, hashtags, favourites and a few other useful tools built into the interface.

Thankfully I use those tools, and a few external ones, or else I wouldn't have got sex. Or at least got into the Everything to Do With Sex Show in Toronto tonight.

I average about 100 tweets or more per day, and I receive about twice that many in terms of mentions, responses, shout-outs, and other short-character thoughts via the Twitter service.

Just happened to catch a tweet about entering a contest for free tickets to the Toronto Sex Show, all you had to do was re-tweet the message. So I did.

And I was very lucky to win! Which I also found out via Twitter.

I was speechless – which is quite hard to demonstrate on Twitter. I've never won anything off of Twitter before, and never knew it would be possible to win anything off the social networking service.

I've entered other contests from other media – television, radio, even newspapers – do they still exist? But I've never entered anything directly via a social networking site – there are so many tweets posted every second . . .

How do you find gems in a sea of thousands of thoughts?

Twitter allows you to create lists, and group people, which is very useful. I do that, but I also create streams to follow in HootSuite, so I can follow these lists easily. HootSuite is a social media manager application, like TweetDeck, which allows you to easily schedule and manager your various social networking accounts.

Hashtags are important too – and they were once thought of as a silly Twitter-only feature. But now hashtags are common on Facebook, Google Plus and many other social networking sites.

Using Hashtags allows you to label specific tweets into subjects, categories and other classifications, so that if you – or someone else – does a search for that hashtag, you can find that tweet.

Though with the increased number of bots lurking out in the social network world, I hesitate to use the hashtag 'sex' because I hate getting flooded with those bots. The sex bots try to get you to sign up for everything from dating services, to prostitution rings.

But the main way I won a contest completely entered online, was doing what you’re supposed to do on social media – engage and interact with others.

All too many of us – and I fall into this camp too sometimes – simply tweet to be seen. We tweet, update our status on Facebook, or post to Tumblr or any of the other social networking sites content which is meaningless, just to get our online profiles into the streams of those following us.

We all too often ignore people reaching out too us via the social networks – which isn't very social.

I make a point to personally thank everyone that follows me on Twitter. And if someone sends me an @ response to my Twitter handle, I usually respond back.

Taking time to share our thoughts to the masses is awesome. Taking the time to get to know those individuals in the masses is even better.

Reach out to your fans, friends and followers. You never know, you may end up going to a sex show – or at the very least, make a new friend.