Besides, when you don’t like socializing somewhere it’s obvious. People will see right through your efforts and you won’t actually be cultivating a genuine sense of community.
Am I saying don’t even sign up for Twitter? No.
What I am saying is that signing up, or not, is entirely up to you.
Get informed about the costs and benefits, check in with your gut, then choose.
Here’s one option: Get a Twitter handle with your name (you might not always hate hanging out there, so it’s good to have it). In your Twitter bio write something like “I don’t hang out here much. Check out my website or find me on Facebook instead.” Then drop the link to your website and/or FB page.
If your gut is telling you that doing even that is too much of an investment, you can choose to skip it all together.
That being said, you have to opt out of a platform like Twitter with the full understanding that other people might have ideas about what it means that you’re not on Twitter (or FB, or IG, or YouTube) — including agents, editors, publishers, readers etc.
Only you know how important what those folks think is in relation to your goals. If they matter at all to your goals, then yes, you probably want to have a Twitter account, even if you won’t invest much time or attention there.
(This works the other way too: if you love tweeting all day and think FB is so last decade, focus your efforts on Twitter; you can always decide to leverage FB’s reach and advertising features in the future if you want to).
Another intuition example:
You get an invitation to do something. Your gut says no. You say “No thank you” and/or “I can’t” and move on. As my preschooler says: easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
(For more on intuition, check out the resources page).
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