Twitter: Waste of Time?

Lately I have been focused on using Twitter. I’ve questioned whether Twitter is useful or just a waste of time.

Twitter, much like facebook, is a conversation-based site where people can follow what you are up to. People search for others that have similar interests and are involved in similar activities. People “follow” each other and reply to each other’s thoughts and recommendations. This is helpful because, once connected, you can expose a link to many people and get a huge response rate. However, at Twitter you are restricted to 140 characters only, which can be annoying and hard if you have a URL that is more than that length. Using a tool such as tinyurl http://tinyurl.com/ can help you out with a shortened version of your link. Be careful not to use tinyurl throughout your daily life because it does have a win-lose factor to it. The winning side is that it is great for links on the go and when you don’t care how many people click the link, or from where. The losing side is that it is terrible for garnering attention and doesn’t elicit a high degree of trust because more experienced users know that is a quick and dirty option for URL shortening. There are other shortening services out there such as is.gd and bit.ly so be sure to explore those options as well if you are shortening links in other locations. Another plus factor for Twitter is that blogs can also be fed onto your Twitter account http://twitterfeed.com/.

Twitter is great in all of the above aspects and can help you build a reliable community of followers. However, it is very time consuming at first. Throughout your day you have to play an active part in people’s conversations. Don’t be shy to get your opinion across and expose yourself to build up a group of followers. Be sure to go on Twitter at least 4-5 times a day. This being said, be careful not to get too addicted to Twitter where you spend hours of your day conversing with people and posting pointless status updates. It will consume your whole day and won’t be helpful at all! There are better and faster options out there for social media linking, such as LinkedIn, that could also use your time and attention!