For the last week, I have spent many random times throughout the day exploring the social media website, Twitter. Before being assigned an assignment in my communications class to do so, I considered Twitter to be a useless imitation of Facebook. From my personal standpoint, I found it a nuisance, wasting my time, signing on and posting my thoughts. I had it in my mind that I did not care about celebrity lives, or what anyone else was doing. This made me think to myself, if i do not care, why would anyone care what I am doing? However, after really getting to know the use and functions of Twitter, I am almost positive that I will continue to network and utilize the various functions of the site.
My first natural thought when I began making a new connection with the site was, "how do i use this?" I began running through all of the settings, and figuring out how to operate the retweets, messaging capabilities, timeline and @mentions. After that, I discovered one of my favorite parts about Twitter that differed from Facebook was the wallpaper and customization options. It fascinated me that I was able to tailor my own personal page to fit my personality. One thing I found annoying was that you cannot upload albums of pictures for people to see. When I see a great place, a new restaurant, or just a good fun time, i love to upload pictures from my camera to show people. Only being able to upload one picture to a post was somewhat frustrating.
In my opinion, Twitter has both good professional and personal values for others and me. Twitter has personal value to me because it gave me the opportunity to share my thoughts and get things off of my mind. It was a good way for me to vent, and a lot of times fellow Tweeter's would relate to it and message me back, or retweet what I had to say. Another good thing it did for me was show commonalities between my classmates and I. Kayla Rose, another student in my communications 634 class tweeted, "Growing up is SCARY. So many big decisions to make. Grad school or job? Ohio or the unknown? I want to know where I'll be in 8 mos!" As soon as I read her post, I thought to myself that I was in the exact same position and was glad to know Im not alone in feeling the same feelings.
More so than a personal value, Twitter has an enormous amount of professional values that come with it. After beginning on my Twitter journey, I realized there was far more to it than just posting thoughts. Major Forbes 500 companies have been using Twitter recently to post job opportunities, internships and important information about their companies. For example: ColumbusAMA, a premier marketing firm located in the city, posted, "Looking for a job? Our next Job Transition Group meeting is three weeks from today (10/26). RSVP here! http://bit.ly/AMAjt1010." Local businesses are also branching out and following locals to share information and news about the city of Columbus. ColumbusPlaces is a Twitter page completely devoted to retweets of people participating in activities, places, and events to see. I posted during the last week that my boyfriend had surprised me on Sunday by taking me to the Professional Bull Riders Invitational at Nationwide Arena, and ColumbusPlaces picked up my tweet and posted it to their page.
The Twitter pages that I enjoyed following the most, and would recommend to anyone were The Columbus Dispatch, The Lantern and Columbus Internships. The newspapers provided me with attractive and news worthy headlines. I found this to be beneficial, because to me it seemed like a faster way to gain important news fast in just one sentence. Columbus Internships caught my eye because I am a senior, and getting as many internships as possible is one of my goals before graduation. Prior to the Twitter assignment, I had never even heard of Columbus Internships and was thankful to find such a helpful organization through Twitter.
Ultimately what I learned from Twitter is that it is a very good marketing strategy. A place to market yourself, your company and anything your passionate about. If anyone can take the time to sit down and learn how to utilize Twitter, it can become a very powerful and important tool personally and professionally
