Each week, we will be posing a question, with each of us providing our perspective of things. To kick our first Roundtable feature off, we’re asking the question:
How do you use Twitter?
Thomas: It took me quite a long time before understanding why Twitter would be useful to the non-technical crowd. It is only when the service grew rapidly in the UK at the end of 2008 that a critical mass of my network started using it. Most of the time, I choose to tweet about news items and blog posts I find interesting. I like to see how my contacts react to those. I have also been able to use the platform to communicate with high profile entrepreneurs, which would have been more difficult normally. To me, Twitter is the combination of networking and information platforms.
Bela: I opened an account months ago but only started using it quite recently. I didn’t have a specific use in mind so have just been experimenting. I’ve been using it for a mix of personal, social and professional reasons. A personal use includes: expressing frustrations; I sometimes just think of it as another way of talking to myself. A social use includes: sharing amusing anecdotes or content. A professional use would include tweeting whenever I write a new post in Startupcafe and giving people updates on my other business endeavours.
I think I’ll end up using my personal account for mainly personal and social reasons. I don’t expect a response when I tweet, quite rightly. However, I am often pleased when I get one!
Kate: Considering I was just at the pub with a few non-social media types asking the same question, I think this is particularly apt. Twitter, to me, is what I use to publish content that is interesting to me – things that I’ve read about lately or events that I’m organising. At the moment, my tweetdeck has a search on Microsoft Surface, Multi-touch, and Edinburgh. This allows me to keep tabs on the latest news happening in those areas. In addition, I also use it to tell people about events I’m going to and finding out about other events. The thing is, Twitter takes a lot of hard work. You only get what you put in.
Jess: I signed up for Twitter as a joke because I thought the Twestival back in February sounded hilarious (and registration required a Twitter name), but little did I know how serious this initiation would become. Now Facebook has taken a back seat in my life! I most often use Twitter to find out about events (or let others know what I’m organising), share experiences that have amused me, or as an ‘ask the audience’ lifeline (ie. searching for a good PR company or scouting startups for a work project). It feels like ‘high-up’ important folks are now totally accessible, and I love being able to contact business people without the formality of an email.
Do you agree with our opinions? How do you use twitter? Comment back and let us know!
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.
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!
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.