It all started with a simple Tweet, or X post, if you prefer. Either way, it was a simple question.
How is everybody doing?
Elmo
The message, from Sesame Street icon Elmo may have just been a throwaway post, but I suspect no one quite expected the response it got.
Hundreds and thousands of people poured their hearts, fears and thoughts out to the little red superstar.
Other celebs and accounts got in on the conversation…of course.
And Elmo took a big lesson from the experience.
But it is not just Elmo who can learn something from this, I reckon we can all take pointers from his X sounding board.
I have a love-hate relationship with the Plaform Formerly Known as X. I have two accounts on the site. My personal account, which I started back in 2009 as another way to stay in touch with my then-long-distance-girlfriend. It didn’t work as a way of communicating between us, but it became a key part of my professional work as a journalist in local news.
But I have fallen out with the site in recent months. My engagement with my personal account now is largely to share work I have done, and to check in with a few select others and what they are up to. The general shouty discourse is not fun and I largely ignore it.
On the other hand, my second personal account is focused on gaming and has a nuch smaller network of people, all discussing the same thing. Everyone does not always agree, but there is a sense that people are there to be part of a community, rather than to bellow from their personal soapbox.
I think that is what Elmo brought back to X for a moment on 29 Janaury, and is why sites such as Discord and Substack are eating into X and even Instagram’s engagement time. It is also what the X accounts that I do still check in with have in common: community.
The beauty of social media is that is connects people. We all have our interests and points of view, some will overlap, others will not. If you find people online who share an interest, then engage with them. You may not agree on everything, the world would be very boring if we did, but that does not mean the whole thing has to descend into hollering and hating.
The internet is our best possible network. Find your people and check in with your friends. Sometimes all it takes is to ask.
What are your favourite X accounts to follow?
Millennial get 
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