Twitter is a fantastic tool. But it doesn’t replace blogging – although it can suppliment it. There is a fantastic service out there called TwitterFeed that will take any RSS feed and send new posts to your Twitter account automatically. That is fantastic because people who are interested in your Tweets are probably also interested in your blog and this way you can promote your blog with no extra effort. And don’t forget you can use RSS feeds to automatically send new posts from your news or blog to other blogs, Facebook, etc.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is basically a micro blog. So instead of writing a long, thought out post, you can keep it small and sweet. In fact, you have to, as each “tweet” is only allowed 140 characters. You can tweet text, links and even photos and you can do it from your computer and even from your cell phone.
So why tweet? Excellent question. It’s a fantastic way to let friends and family know what you’re up to and share the small things that happen in your day. Often people use it for sharing a random amusing thought or a fantastic website link or a photo of their kids. Professionally it’s a fantastic way to find other people with similar interests and learn from them and share things you’ve found to be helpful too. Often people use Twitter for posting questions to friends and colleagues as well.
Recently Twitter added the ability to search tweets. This is huge. Now you can see trends of what people are talking about right this second, unlike searching on Google and finding pages that were indexed days or even weeks ago. It’s like a giant, world-wide chat room. For example, your wife may be a huge American Idol Fan (This is all hypothetical, of course). You could search on the term “Idol” and find what a bazillion other people are talking about right that second regarding American Idol. And it’s usually pretty amusing.Will Twitter replace Google….I doubt it, but it does have it’s place for searching for things that are very time sensitive, like news.
Tags: Automatically, Blog, News, Tweet