By Zia H Shah MD
The Holy Quran had prophesied that at the time of the second coming of the Messiah or the Latter Days, humanity will be brought so close as if they are a part of a family (81:8). The Quran also predicted that printing and publishing will shoot through the roof in the Latter Days (81:11).
These prophecies are being fulfilled in different dimensions and a revolution is happening in front of your eyes in human interaction.
Twitter is becoming a major share holder in the landscape of social media. More than half a billion tweets are generated every day.
If you have something important to say and you have followers in Twitter then more power to you. But, even if you do not have followers you can still be effective and join the conversation, in the public square of the twenty first century, by making 20 lists of 500 leaders in religion, politics, journalism, science and entertainment industry.
Yes you can do that. Twitter allows you to tweet to anyone. The good news is that to a recipient your tweet will look the same in their inbox, whether it is from an unknown person, President Obama, President Clinton, Queen of England, Ex First Lady Hilary Clinton, the past or the future Pope, Dali Lama, Mel Gibson or Prof. Richard Dawkins.
Even if you are not well known you can still make a big difference in the contemporary world. Twitter has leveled the playing field.
You no longer need to obsesses over what a certain celebrity said or did to grab public attention. You can be part of the leading crowd yourself by joining the conversation.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an influential German philosopher of the 19th century said: “Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long.” It can be done, one tweet at a time, like a steady water stream cutting through stones.
Five minutes of your daily work may turn out to be more productive than the rest of 23 hours and 55 minutes. It may even bring you fame or notoriety depending upon what you tweet.
The technical aspects are described in the comments below and I will entertain questions also.
And yes you can tweet our headlines that you like with our URLs in the Muslim Times. We do not claim any copy rights in service to humanity.
Categories: Social Media
How to make a list
If you click on your own name when you are logged into Twitter, a screen opens up, which shows in the top of the left column:
Tweets
Following
Followers
Favorites
Lists
Click on the list and then make a list and give it a name, like “Leaders.” To add people to the list you search them and open anyone’s account. When you open someone’s account, on the top, just below the colored rectangle and their picture, you see their statistics:
13,834 Tweets
232 Following
70,120 Followers
On the right side of this row is a button to “follow” and next to it is an small icon of a person and you can click on it to add this person to one of your lists.
Twitter also tells you if the account of the person has been confirmed and not fake by a blue check mark.
Please ask me questions if need be.
How to tweet to a list
My name in twitter is @ZiahShah1. I have a list in Twitter named Senators.
So, to give a real life example, if I start my tweet message with:
@ZiahShah1/Senators
It will go to all the recipients included in my list named Senators.
As you know the total tweet message cannot be longer than 140 characters. So, an easy recipe is to make a post in your blog or use a post in the Muslim Times and let your tweet be the heading and URL of the post.
The recipients in Twitter can then click on the URL and read the post.
JazakAllah for this very informative post. May Allah bless you. i have a question that Paksitani leaders don’t have blue check marks?
My impression is that if these accounts have large number of followers they are probably valid accounts, Twitter just has not taken the pain to confirm accounts in what they may call, the third world countries.
Another way to be certain is to read some of the tweets by those persons and see if those match with their public persona or character or not.
Thank you very much Zia sb. for this very educative post. God bless you.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iA9NKB6rK0&w=490&h=275%5D
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0uhifkIfs&w=420&h=315%5D
Since my initial posting, I have found that technically these recommendations are not working. At least not now.
So please search some more and try out different things before following the advice given above.
Thanks