Twitter is a great utility for people to connect with one another on a small microblogging platform. It’s an incredible tool for the expeditious dissemination of information (just ask Amazon). That being said, everyone uses Twitter differently. Some use it for promotion, some use it to help others. Twitter is still in its infancy, and we’re all still learning how to optimize our usage.* Some people have been fired because of Twitter, and some have been called out publicly.
*Full disclosure: My Twitter account is less than six months old and I was extremely skeptical of Twitter for a long time. I believe that the criticism of email (they are brief and devoid of human emotion and interaction – smileys aside =) holds true for Twitter and is even more obvious with a limit on word usage.
As someone who was an early adopter of Facebook, and has used AIM and Gmail status updates, Twitter has been an interesting and different experience for me. I think it’s a great service, and is no different than any other type of networking, online or otherwise. As long as you are honest, transparent and mindful of other peoples’ feelings, I don’t think there’s really a “wrong” way to use it unless you spam.
To keep transparent about my own motives, I felt it important to create a page documenting how I use Twitter, and how I do not use Twitter. If you would like to follow my updates, you can use the feed on this page, or follow me here.
How I use Twitter:
1. New Information. Twitter is one of the tools I use to keep my ear to the ground. I use Twitter in many ways to find out and post about new information.
2. Analysis. Since my Twitter isn’t specific to certain topics (like Techshots), I use it to analyze / look at information about many issues from baseball to gaming.
3. Blog traffic. When I have something new up, I’ll post the link and the topic. If you’re interested, I hope you will take a look.
4. Conversation. If someone is talking about an interesting topic, I like to share my opinions. I make sure not to carry on conversations more than a couple @replies, however.
5. Networking. Social networks make it easy to talk with like-minded people from hundreds or thousands of miles away. I use Twitter to connect with new people.
How I don’t use Twitter:
1. Unimportant personal updates. I realize you may be following 10, 100 or 1,000 people. In the interest of your time, I will try not to post small details about my life that may only apply to a few people.
2. Confidential information. I will never use confidential information from any job in which I am working. Any and all information or statistics I use are publicly available.
How do you use Twitter? Do you use it in a similar (or vastly different) way? As noted, I’m still new to this and would love to hear your suggestions or other ideas.
