Twitter

[thebigcheese]

So...when I went in for my job interview on Tuesday, the interviewer guy said I should really start using Twitter to keep up with industry news. I've been trying it out for the past few days, and I've been trying to figure out if there's a way to filter it -- either within Twitter itself or using a third-party program. For some reason, I've been getting a few foreign language tweets (retweets maybe?) and I'd like to filter out certain lifestyle things if possible. For example, I follow a few people who usually tweet about industry-related news, but sometimes they tweet about how they got effing drunk last night. Mostly, I'm just trying to declutter and want to get rid of that extra fluff. Any ideas?

[Katya]

Are there any hashtags strongly associated with your industry? Or maybe there are other people who tweet about your industry whose twitter feeds are more professional.

[Dead Cat]

I've been thinking about getting a twitter. Is it worth it?

[Dragon Lady]

I've been thinking about getting a twitter. Is it worth it?

[shrug] Depends on what you like. It's another social networking site. I like it, but I could also live without it. I follow a few friends, mostly Board writers, and an author I like and I get maybe … 15 tweets per day? I tweet maybe… once per week? Yellow, on the other hand, uses it partially to network with programming and even got an contracted programming job from a person who reads his Tweets. So it's a really great site for him.

If you're using it purely for personal, I guess the question is, do you like to keep up on people's facebook statuses? Cuz it's largely the same thing.

[thebigcheese]

I think you need to have a specific purpose for getting one. It's great for news. It's great for businesses and for keeping up with businesses you like. It's great if you're into celebrity gossip and want to keep up with certain celebrities. It's great for networking with important people in your industry. It's great if you want to read nothing but Facebook statuses. Uhh...I'm sure there's more.

If I didn't have a specific purpose for Twitter (i.e. reading up on industry news), then I would probably think it's dumb. As a personal social tool (like Facebook), I don't think it's very useful. But for business? Heck yeah. I get hundreds of tweets per day from industry professionals, so I know what's important to the best people of my field because it's right on my Twitter account. I can keep up with new developments. I can also keep tabs on which industry conferences are coming up because people mention them. It's also a great source for job listings and interesting articles that I never would've known about otherwise (and that also means less effort for me because I don't have to go searching for them).

[Digit]

So if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of followers that a big important person in your industry has, who gets comments on their tweets by the thousands, who is of course not a follower of you (or, if they are, it's a perfunctory reaction to you following them and they don't really stop to notice when you put something out), and you wanted them to hear your voice because you felt you had something useful to say to them specifically, is it pretty much equal to you yelling out your message to them while standing in a room with 100,000 other people and hoping that, by luck and luck alone, they happened to pick your message out from the firehose of data?

[thebigcheese]

Eh, it's the same as anything else. Some people are simply inaccessible to the general public because of high demand and high security. I mean, if you're trying to network with high-profile people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you'd better be a high-profile person yourself. They simply don't have time to listen to hundreds of thousands of people, regardless of the medium used to contact them. And I think it's unrealistic to expect anything more from them.

In a business setting, I would say that Twitter is more about hearing the influential people than having a lot of influence yourself. If your tweets are consistently really good, you might gain a following. But don't bet on it.