Last night, a good friend confessed to me she “didn’t get Twitter”, and that she wasn’t going to. Fearing I was going to lose one of my followers, I told her about an upcoming blog post I was writing (this very one) about the virtues of Twitter. She rolled her eyes at the idea, unimpressed by my efforts. Ten reasons she’s already heard this wasn’t about to change anything.
She’s right, many of these lists make it onto blogs somewhere. Despite these doubts I persisted, and with a different approach, I think I might have caught her attention a bit. I told her about a day in the life using Twitter.Here’s what I did using twitter, yesterday:
It started a slow morning, but by 12pm the tweets were flying.
12pm – 1pm :
- Heard from Alison Doyle, from About.com’s job searching blog about resume writing on the internet. Gave some real thought to changing the format of my resume so it doesn’t confuse automated readers. Also considered including my china trip to “fill in the gaps” in my work experience.
- Heard about a track by the duo ‘Themselves” from anticon.
1 pm – 3pm :
- Searched for designers and UX professionals, using search.twitter.com and found IBM Design. Proceeded to follow them and download their recommended podcasts on User Experience Design. Am also following IdeaKitchn, self-described UX ninja.
- A search for Wordpress experts yielded the twitter of a blog writer for Marvel comics
- Gave thanks to IBM design for pointing me to the UX podcasts. Received thanks back
- Was linked to a video released by Microsoft, showing the vision of the future in technology. Very cool
- Someone tweeted about a tool to integrate Twitter into google searching. Get liver news at it happens!
3pm – 6pm:
- Was on Berkeley campus studying, and going to a career fair where Salesforce and Intuit were to be present.
- Salesforce flaked and their rep didn’t show. Intuit’s did and gave me really good advice on my resume and job possibilities. I twitted about how helpful intuit was and how I got stood up by Salesforce.
- As a result, I have one new follower from Salesforce and one new follower from Intuit
- Read about Typography and Photoshop (courtesy of Smashing Magazine)
7pm – 12pm:
- Casual time: I found out about my friend’s new dubstep track, some new Oakland grafitti, and a friend’s bowel movements.
- Caught wind of new social software, started by two ex-Googlers, in beta version. Likaholix is a personal recommendation micro-sharing service. Could it be the next big thing?
- Found out about Indie-mart this Sunday. DIY and vintage market/swap meet. Sounds cool
Hope this ‘day in the life’ was informational for you all. Twitter is years old and many of you are already signed up. I thought I’d chime in to talk to those who have not picked up this quick and addicting form of communication, or have not yet considered how it might be applied creatively. My advice to those who want to expand their use:
1) Find interesting people. This doesn’t have to be people you know!
2) Cross-polinate. This mean repeating (or re-tweeting–RT–, as it’s called) any interesting links or information you might hear. This will spread it to your followers, who may attract other followers from their sphere.
3) Post links, create a response
4) respond to others using the @ symbol
Thanks again for reading!
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For those who are interested, here’s the original draft for this blog post, ten reasons why you should be on Twitter (which I started earlier but decided to abandon in favor of this day in the life posting):
1. Talk with your friends quicker
2. You become known to people who care – What do 160 letters communicate about you? Actually, quite a bit. A few tweets from a person could tell me more about them than a whole profile does on anther social networking site. Tweets are more personal, they’re random, mundane, but there is a certain genuinity to these thoughts. And then in turn attracts other people interested in your tweets.
3. Networking with the right people - Finding people in a given profession is a difficult task, communicating with them can be even harder. LinkedIn, the social network for professionals puts barriers and permissions, making networking with professionals an involving task. Not to say this shouldn’t be the case, or that LinkedIn doesn’t have its uses, but on Twitter there is little to stop you from. Depending on who you follow and what they share, Twitter like being over the water-cooler overhearing the talk in a given profession.
4. Get breaking news on Twitter – see Mumbai terror attacks (noticed by Twitter employees through tweet aggregation) and the US Airways crash in the Hudson River was first revealed via a twitpic.
5. Changing the social and cultural sphere - Following bands, brands, business trends is easy on twitter. Use Twibs to find out which businesses are on twitter.
6. Companies are picking up on it – The quickest adopters were news companies such as CNN, BBC, and ABC. However, companies looking to increase their Public Relations influence using social media have caught up on it. Are you a business person or in a band or creative industry? Market yourself better with Twitter!
7. It’s better than a Facebook status update – Are you ever on facebook and find your newsfeed swallowed up by status updates from people you barely care about? But you feel too lazy or too nice to un-friend them? And you can’t seem to get the Facebook filter to “Show me less” of that person’s updates? If you would like to know what’s going on right now, in the lives of the people you are actually interested in, use Twitter.
8. You can communicate from anywhere with a smartPhone – Anyone with a BlackBerry or an iPhone can tweet from a phone. That also means that with an unlimited data plan, and a social network that uses twitter, you could potentially text for free. This was one of the inspirations behind the 140 character limit. Most SMS/text services only allow 160 characters, and Twitter employees wanted to circumvent that.
9. Search
10. No Ads, and it’s free!