I signed up for Twitter over 1 year ago but never really started getting into it until recently, mainly because I didn’t ‘get it.’ It reminded me of the amount of time it took me to see those computer generated 3d images. You know the ones. People said things like, ‘you just look inside of it’ or ‘stare at it, but unfocus your eyes.’ It all came together for me after spending time actually using Twitter because I knew that I would never ‘get it’ until I understood what it could do for me.
Twitter is about the democratization of information. Unlike facebook or myspace which help you connect with your friends, Twitter enables you to connect with EVERYBODY and for EVERYBODY to connect with you. Now, if you’re privacy conscious, you might not think that this sounds good, but hear me out.
By compressing a message down into 140 characters, something pretty ground breaking happens. Each bit of news, gossip, information, or whatever it is you’re interested in flows freely to you in a way that you can actually digest it. This means that you can connect with more sources of information in a way so incredibly efficient, that you have completely optimized how you consume information of any type. Newspapers, magazines, nightly news all seem hopelessly outdated and inefficient. Don’t think of Twitter as all about ‘What are you doing?’ because it isn’t. I know it says that on the Twitter homepage, but it doesn’t have to be what ends up getting tweeted. You can tell a joke, pass along some news, show people what the newest iPhone looks like, share a picture of your daughter getting her first haircut or your new favorite song.
This is a game changer that should not be dismissed as the next big fad. The more I see the power of this concept, the more I see that Twitter is a huge paradigm shift that will seriously affect the businesses that I just mentioned.
Since I’ve joined Twitter, I’m adding more and more people to follow and I see that no matter how many I add, it’s not that difficult to stay up to date on every one of them by scanning through their tweets very fast. These 140 character snippets, enable me to keep up to date on everything that I’m interested in, in the most efficient way possible. In many cases they contain a link that allows me to dig further into the information by watching a video, looking at a picture or hearing a song.
As an information consumer, this is really cool. And let’s face it, we all consume information of some kind. If we could do this more efficiently, wouldn’t it make sense? Of course it would! We obviously live in an information based economy, people continuing to adopt Twitter and integrate it into their lives seems like the next evolution in how we will all consume information.
When the web first became mainstream, having a web site or a blog was an exciting way to make you or your company visible to the entire world. Today, this is still true, but if you don’t rank highly for your keywords in Google, people will never find your site. Earning this ranking takes time and money. In many ways, Twitter changes all of this and turns it upside down. By removing the friction between people consuming and generating information, Twitter makes information flow more freely between people than ever before.
If you have a business or need to reach lots of people for whatever reason, this democratization of information enables you to do it! It becomes so trivial to begin following someone that you may only be remotely interested in, there’s no reason not to. If you provide interesting, entertaining, funny or useful information of any kind, people will follow you and you will have an ongoing dialog with them. They will also have an ongoing dialog with you. I try to follow every business that I frequent. This includes the @nba, restaurants, @CNN and @BreakingNews.
Another way to look at it is like going to some event or conference where there’s a whole roomful of people who are all there because they’re interested in the same topic that you are. Imagine you’re at this conference, and you’re standing in the middle of every single group of people on the conference floor at the same time listening to what they are discussing. Pretty cool, huh? That’s what Twitter allows you to do.
To get started on Twitter, start following people. Don’t worry about what you’re going to say, just jump in and listen to others, then you can contribute when you feel ready. How do you find people to follow? There are a many ways. Try clicking on ‘Find People’ then click on the last of 4 tabs – ‘Suggested Users.’ This is a great place to start finding some of the most popular people to follow on Twitter. Next try searching for people you know – you’re sure to find at least a few, especially if you’re on other social networks. Next you’ll want to try searching Twitter for topics that interest you. You’ll end up viewing a variety of conversations with links to the people doing the talking. When you find some interesting tweets with your search word, click on the user’s profile picture to learn more about them and read more of their tweets. Follow anyone who you find remotely interesting. As I said, it’s easy to stay up to date, even if you’re following hundreds or thousands of people. There are also many sites available to help you find people to follow. A couple I like are wefollow.com or twellow.com.
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