What Is Twitter?

Twitter is an active online community and form of social media that allows people to communicate with other Twitter members. Twitter limits communication to 140 characters (including spaces) for each tweet sent.

You follow people to be able to easily see what they are tweeting and hope they follow you back so they can read your pearls of wisdom – including things like what you ate for breakfast as well as your latest report on a crisis situation. It’s kind of a site for all seasons and can help you connect to others during your career transition and exploration, as well as sell that eBook you wrote years ago about macrame car covers that’s still sitting on your cyber-shelf.

When I first started on Twitter, as simple as it may seem to folks who use it all the time, I found all the little abbreviations and protocols – maybe accepted customs is a better term – confusing.  There are Retweets (RTs) and Twitter Lists and Direct Messages. There’s even a Twitter Profile as well as a way to display your location apart from your profile.

But without going into all the details, the main thing you might want to use this for is finding interesting articles, people to connect to, and, if you’re lucky, a network that will support you in whatever you’re doing.  In my experience, I’ve found the members of my own network to be extremely intelligent, generous, kind, and polite – but also willing to tweet in on some fun thing one of us might uncover. While some Tweets may go mostly unread, some can take off in seconds and race around the world. It’s fascinating to see this happen – and extremely useful to people who are in a place where other communication may not be possible.

All that said…it’s still up to you to decide whether this is the best use of your time and how much effort you’re willing to give it.   Then again…how can you quantify the value of finding that one person or article you see tweeted that gives you just what you need? Hmmm…maybe if you tweet the question, you’ll get your answer. 

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