Are You Tweeting? Find Out How To Make The Most Of It
Posted by Michelle Moquin on December 22nd, 2009
Find Twitter To Be Useless? You’re Doing It Wrong
I’ve come across people both online and in real life who view Twitter as this useless service with 2 ridiculous purposes: Assisting in stalking, and giving people the opportunity to share their boring lives with the world, and follow their friends’ boring lives. In truth, there’s really more to Twitter than just sharing a picture of the waffles you had for breakfast.
As I run GeekSmack and write articles for the site, it’s obviously important to stay up to date on all the occurrences in the technology world. Along with having a comprehensive RSS feed collection, I also follow some technology publications and tech bloggers on Twitter. At times, a blogger would post an exclusive and tweet about it. This thus tips me off about it along with various other bloggers, causing the article to spread like wildfire.
I also follow publications as I mentioned above. Most technology news sites out there, including GeekSmack, have a Twitter account that automatically tweets new articles published. This allows you to have all the latest articles from these trusted publications in your Twitter stream, allowing you to view them at a glance.
Often, people discover news faster on Twitter than they do by other means. This of course isn’t limited to technology news; it can apply to political news (people may either find out about it by following a news publication of their choice, or discover it through the “Trending Topics” feature, which at times has political topics should it be significant enough to cause a large number of people to tweet about it). Everyone, including the news media itself was generally kept up to date on the Iranian elections for example via Twitter. People find out that celebrities die via Twitter. I personally found out that more Google Wave invites were being delivered via Twitter.
Of course, the trending topics often are dominated by rather dumb topics from time to time, but they do prove useful. Along with what I mentioned above, I’ve also followed some good discussions on Twitter. I’ve debated, watched debates on the sidelines, and even seen some arguments. It’s pretty interesting at times to see debates and arguments take place when each person only has 140 characters per tweet to work with.
Twitter is useful to businesses (and their clients) as well. They can tweet about their latest news, products, information, promotions, etc., and their loyal customers can stay up to date and perhaps learn about a certain new product, or the fact that the company is opening up a store in their area which they may otherwise have never known about. Online stores such as Amazon use Twitter to share with their customers the latest and greatest deals, so you may find out that a certain product you’ve been looking to buy is cheaper than it has ever been through Twitter.
The point here is that, while some only use Twitter for the purpose of sharing their lives with the world and tweeting every detail of it, others use it to debate, stay informed, learn about good deals, increase the amount of dedicated clients to their business, stay updated on their favorite companies and their latest products, and more. Twitter is a tool that allows people to be connected with the world, and, while sharing what you do in life is perfectly fine, you shouldn’t limit your use of this powerful service to that.
Zen Lill: You are so right – ‘frustration’ doesn’t cover it. As far as ‘going Ghandi’, I am near there…all I need is to figure out the place and time.
Got to run…
Love & Peace: “Live it, Give it!”
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: Your Bad Ass Bitch Editor
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December 22nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Hello Michelle; How are you doing today? I don’t use Twitter, Facebook, Geeksmack, or Googlewave. I don’t even know what they are exactly or how to use them. Am I missing anything good?
In fact your blog is the only blog I have ever used (other than Zen Lill’s (HI) blog. Can you tell me what these things are? I really don’t know.
Besides using your blog,what are other blogs about or for? This has always been a mystery to me. I asked Howie and he believes these are just methods to gather more personal information about an individual for ‘Big Brother’s files.
Michelle, what is Twitter and tweets, Facebook and faces? It seems like another ploy by the powers that be to compile a file on you and your style.
Please, I really need to be set straight about this. It makes no sense to me at all. Thanking you in in advance. Am I missing something something realy worthwhile?
Al