Comments on: Roundtable Discussion: How do YOU use Twitter?

By: Jessica Williamson

Jessica Williamson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:38:12 +0000

Ben, love the notion of a second account to chat amongst a special circle of friends. My friends from uni in the states and i exchange long emails as irregular updates, but would be nice to have ongoing Twitter chat instead.

And Hilary, I definitely find that social/professional life is blurred together nowadays… tweeting from @Jesso52, @infventures, @EclubEDI, and @startupcafe… hard to decide when to be ‘Jess’ and when to be ‘the organisation,’ but seems the best org/company tweets are the ones that feel they’re from a ‘real person’ anyways… so totally support the one account approach! Keep your sanity while you can.

By: Hilary Singer

Hilary Singer — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:16:40 +0000

I only have one Twitter account at the moment. It’s such a good medium that I often tweet about work-related things, when it’s really my personal account.

I thought about getting another account, but I worry that the real problem is that my social/personal life is inextricably mixed with my professional life. A new tweet-voice won’t solve that problem!

By: Ben Seven

Ben Seven — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:36:31 +0000

I use Twitter in three main ways:

1. A regular, public-facing account (@ben_seven) that is for normal interactions with people I know, have met via Twitter or picked up from others I’m following, or random folks who I follow because they’re funny or informative. I try and limit the number of people I follow and they’re usually not celebrities or brands: quite often social media types or other designer/developers, but a handful of ‘normals’ as well!

The messsages I post on this account are usually links I’ve found, bits and pieces of my own work, things I’ve seen (via iPhone/Twitpic) and random observations.

2. A private, protected account used with 5 other design graduates, who have similar accounts to share experiences and problems while working. Using Twitter as an instant platform for support, solidarity and general banter within a closed-group mentality has kept us all in touch post-college and when we need to vent or get in contact with one another, while encouraging more open conversation than would have been possible without updates protected.

3. A last account auto-tweets the posts from a private blog held by the aforementioned collective, so the members know when there’s new activity: just leveraging Twitter as a notification platform.

With RSS, account options and some creative thinking, twitter can be really quite flexible as a platform for a number of applications. Underpinning all of this it’s essential to run a decent multi-account Twitter client like Tweetie for Mac, and Tweetie for iPhone – brilliant examples of taking the hard work out of juggling multiple accounts.