Twitter: giving a voice to the disenfranchised TV viewer or stroking the egos of prissy bubble-wrapped bloggers? Enhancing your watching experience with a public commentary or ruining your Saturday evening with incessant mentions of ‘Rylan from X-Factor’? Really easy to get to grips with or about as useful as the Marauder’s Map to a muggle? Well, we’re here to help you get started or, if after six months you still have only 30 followers, kickstart your microblogging experience into twitter fame and fortune.
How to tweet…
Live-tweeting is a dangerous game because you’re entering a market that is saturated with the unregulated opinions of thousands of other guppy, TV-addled armchair pundits. Observations like ‘RIP Lady Sybil’ or ‘Dimbleby’s forehead is so sweaty!!’ are unlikely to win you legions of admirers, because, let’s face it, you’re not saying anything interesting. Whilst it’s almost always preferable to wait until after the broadcast in order to give your scathing/insightful/sycophantic input, if you have to live-tweet make sure you say something worth the 140 characters, or something profoundly shocking. Try ‘so glad that Lady Sybil’s dead’ or ‘I’d like to lick the sweat off Dimbleby’s forehead’ in order to get a few extra followers.If you’ve just seen a film and are desperate to tweet about it then it’s best to not even wait until the popcorn’s been swept up. The moment the credits are rolling no one can really tell you to put your phone away, so whip it out and give that opinion that the universe has been craving. ‘That was soooo good! I smell Oscars’ is a useless tweet to anyone who doesn’t know which movie you’ve just watched, whereas ‘Paranormal Activity 4 gave me nightmares about a world where people make shit films (and there are ghosts)’ is a much more specific tweet for your adoring public. Does anyone really want to hear your opinion? No, but if you relentlessly self-promote then, eventually, you’ll deceive a certain amount of people into believing you have some authority about what you’re saying.
Who to follow…
The best tweeters come from far and wide, but regularly come up with pithy one-line opinions that express exactly what you’re thinking – just more funnily and with fewer typos. Some of the best film tweeters represent the funniest film websites, so try checking out @ultraculture, @IncredibleSuit and @TheShiznitfor consistently witty opinions. For more erudite views, you might like to check out this term’s interviewee @PeterBradshaw1, The Times film critic @MuirKate and Wittertainment’s @KermodeMovie.TV is much more of a free-for-all, so it might be best for you to pin your colours to the mast of a TV comedian. @DavidSchneider is back from the break he took for *unexplained* reasons, and regularly provides us with gems. Likewise, @StephenFry is often interested in what’s on the box and @RickyGervais can usually be counted on to express the opposite opinion to whatever consensus has emerged. But your best bet is to check out which TV shows are trending and explore from there. If anyone is really writing psycho-sexual tweets about David Dimbleby then you need to get following them asap. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not follow our recently launched, and totally amazing, @CherwellFilmTV? We sometimes retweet the hilarious, broken English promotional tweets from the Turf Tavern and, if that isn’t worth reading, then I don’t know what is…
What not to do…
The list of ‘what not to do’ on Twitter is potentially inexhaustible. It starts with the patently obvious, like not tweeting a close-up picture of your penis Soulja Boy, to avoiding accidentally tweeting your flirty DMs. When it comes to Film and TV, the main problems occur when you are (a) not relevant, (b) not funny, or (c) really racist. The first two are much more common problems but do not carry the threat of gaol time, so try and focus equally on all of these things.You can avoid the irrelevance issue by resisting the temptation to tweet about Seinfeld, anything on TCM or the 1996 Steven Seagal movie, The Glimmer Man. You can avoid being unfunny by retweeting the carefully composed tweets of our recommended tweeters (or just outright stealing them; IP is as important to Twitter as it is to the Chinese government), suddenly becoming really funny (potentially difficult, might require you to get bitten by Eddie Izzard) or just sticking to tweets where you have something original to say. Avoiding the third of our problems is really reliant on you being an intelligent, tolerant person and vigorously applauding all Spike Lee movies.Well, now you’re ready for Twitter. Go out there and spread your seed over the internet in gobbets of 140 characters or less. Tweet us with all your film and TV opinions (nonboring ones, please) to @CherwellFilmTV or use the hashtag #CherwellFilmTV and we’ll aggressively retweet you to thank you for making it to the end of this article.
