The Power of Twitter

Aug 31st 2008
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Twitter story

Twitter started its career as a research and development project in the beginning of 2006 and was officially launched in October, the same year. It became popular very quickly, won a web award and as of July 2008, over 2,200,000 accounts were registered.

Getting an account

I registered on Twitter and, not being able to recognize it’s greatness for the first time, I deleted my account quickly.

Later somehow got the feeling that I might could use this micro blogging/social networking platform for something.

Twitter Bird

I have to tell that it wasn’t an easy process to recover my account however after several attempt and several error messages and few weeks waiting ‘your account is being deleted and will be deleted in the next 24 hours‘, i wrote to the customer service and in a couple of days my account was restored.

The stream of 140 character life stories

I quickly realized my first mistake with Twitter. I registered, and after finding a few friends of mine who already registered I settled down and waited for the Twitter experience… never arrived.

My friends stopped posting after a few days and so did I. I deleted the account and that was it.

The second time it worked much better. First of all I haven’t limited my contact list to my friends instead went out and searched my local area for like minded designers etc. etc. Also looked for people who’s blogs are in my RSS Feed so in a few minutes I had a nice long list of interesting people and a nice long list of interesting tweets with local information and with information can be interesting for me.

Twitter Whale

Power Tweet begins

I have been working on my portfolio book what I’m going to publish on Lulu soon. On the first day I found out that heather_jane actually already published her own book so by contacting her I could get some valuable information about Lulu and how good quality are the books printed by them.

The other day I just read Jacob’s last call for his blog post Twitter Link Love. Jacob featured my website in his article, and as his blog is ranked #8 blog in Australia, it really brought a lot of visitors to my site.

I connected my Twitter account to my Facebook so all my friends can see my new messages and also inserted a small JavaScript here in the right corner so it also shows on my blog what am I up to at the moment.

Twitter Enterprise

Cisco and other large businesses use Twitter to provide product or service information. Digg also has a Twitter account to give updates to it’s users. If you visit Twitterholic, you can see the most popular users of Twitter and can find a few well known people and companies among them.

Tweetlancer - Build Your Freelance Profile

You can easily realize that Twitter is actually not just a powerful time waster tool rather a Swiss army knife for your business marketing, networking, etc. I think most freelancer, self-employed people agree on that one of the best medium to bring in clients is words of mouth.

Twitter is the online equivalent of words of mouth.

As soon as you register you can look for people you have something in common. You just joined the biggest stream of constantly fresh information so let’s filter it and take the best out of it.

Let’s say you are a graphic designer. After searching for local designers, illustrators, freelancers I’m pretty sure you will have already a nice list of people. Checking their posts and how regularly they send a tweet can help you filter the information you will get. At the end of the day we don’t twitter to know what everybody eat for dinner in town.

After building up the group of locals you are following (and pretty soon the group of followers will grow as well) why don’t we expand. I’m sure if you are a graphic designer, you have a nice big, fat RSS Feed. So let’s go and search through your favorite websites and blogs looking for the Twitter bird. I’m sure most bloggers already have an account. In this way you can get some quality information, useful links and keep in touch with the people you’ve been already reading their blogs.

After that you will have a bounch of design experts followed by, and following you and I’m sure that a stream of interesting information will start flowing in. But we don’t stop there. Twitter has more to offer.

Why shouldn’t you find actually potential clients in this way? Who knows which art director, senior designer from a local design studio, or a local business owner will click on your freshly posted portfolio link?

Vandelay Design composed a nice list of Designers you can follow on Twitter.

Also there is a great opportunity here to give back something to the community. Helping people, new starters or anyone who needs is a great thing and rewarding.

I’m really happy with Twitter and keep exploring the endless possibilities it has to offer (if you have any good idea how else Twitter can be useful, please share it).

However I’m going to disconnect Twitter from my Facebook account as it seriously messes up my Profile with all the Tweets and can be annoying for my friends.

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