This is the fourth post in my series of introducing you to the common forms of social media that can lead to information overload or infomania. In the earlier posts we had a closer look at social media, blogs and RSS, today we turn our attention to Twitter.
Wikipedia.org defines Twitter as:
“a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”
Commoncraft explains it as follows:
And a good overview of Twitter.
Very recently you may have heard about Twitter being used to in connection with the Mumbai bombings. The presentation below gives a bit more detail.
So what does this have to do with you and productivity?
This is a question that has been doing the rounds a lot lately. There are many people infinitely more qualified than me to answer this question, so what follows is a very limited perspective.
Firstly, I use Twitter to stay abreast of topics that I am interested in, such as social media, the pharmaceutical industry, marketing, technology and productivity, by following people who are experts in those areas and who also use Twitter, e.g. if you are in to GTD you can follow David Allen. Secondly I use it to stay in touch with a couple of my friends who also use Twitter.
Twitter can be a bit of a time-sink, and I manage it by using an excellent desktop client called Tweetdeck. I tend to let Tweetdeck run in the background and scan it from time to time. If a particular Tweet catches my eye I will either favourite it (and go back later and batch process all my favourites) or, if I have time, follow the Tweet at the time. As you can imagine, a certain modicum of discipline is required not to become completely engrossed in Twitter as it can be like tapping in to a rich vein of information, and for anyone it can be quite difficult to ignore all the good stuff.
To prevent this from happening, I have Tweetdeck set up to group my interests together, e.g. pharmaceutical Tweets are all grouped together and marketing Tweets are grouped separately. In this way I can also batch process Tweets without getting sidetracked.
If you are interested in using Tweetdeck, and how to boost your productivity, I urge you to read this article by Chris Spagnuolo called How to use Tweetdeck - the ultimate Twitter client
And if you ever want to look me up on Twitter, you can find me here
Very nice AA, I think people are just beginning to realise that using Twitter for specific purposes (distributing content, tracking niche 'following groups', news scraping etc) can actually improve the way you execute certain tasks (thus drive productivity). The key is to replace the old ways, rather than make these new habits and adjunct... and the best thing about Twitter is that it's such a basic and open premise that uses and features will be built on top of it (by others) that we haven't thought of yet.. loving that bit :)
Dave