Photo courtesy of Cottyn

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

I’ve been a member of Twitter for a long time, but I only started using it properly last month. When I first joined Twitter, I must admit that I couldn’t see the point. After all, who cared what I was doing and I wasn’t sure I cared what anyone else was doing. As it turned out, I was wrong, and I’m happy to admit it. I recently wrote a post on Get Paid To Write Online about adding glue to social relationships. My point was that as web workers we need something to keep us in touch with the people we talk to every day but have never seen. Twitter is one possible solution.

Sharon In Twitterland

In Twitterland, you can follow and be followed. If you follow someone, you get their updates in your Twitter stream. Following someone is entirely your choice, so you can choose people with particular interests to follow. One of the interesting things about Twitter is that there are a lot of successful bloggers there who share resources of interest. Sometimes these are their own posts; at other times they are resources created by others. Most of the time, in my experience at least, what is shared is of excellent quality. Following bloggers like Darren Rowse, Chris Garrett and Maki is a great way the be tuned in to the blogosphere.

I also find it useful to keep in touch with my writing friends. It’s a bit like a water cooler. We talk about what we’re working on and exchange stories about good and bad client relationships. We point out useful resources and we highlight good posts on writing.

The Good And The Bad

One of the best and most frustrating things about Twitter is that each message can be no more than 140 characters. It’s frustrating because sometimes you just need a couple of extra characters to finish your message and you have to send two instead. In spite of that, I think it’s good, because it forces you to think about what’s essential about your message. In other words, it cuts out the dross and the drivel.

Those who use Twitter well combine self promotion with helping others and with general chit chat. For me, this all came together a couple of weeks ago. I had some hosting problems which resulted in the temporary loss of two of my blogs. I tweeted about it, more to share the pain than anything. To my surprise several of my Twitter friends chimed in with useful suggestions for recovering my content and getting my blog up and running. Thanks to them, I was able to repair a potentially disastrous situation quite quickly.

A Twitter Addiction

In the last month, Twitter has become a part of my daily routine. It’s addictive. I learn a lot just by following the conversations between certain top bloggers, and I also enjoy sharing the day with others in the same business. Whenever I ask a question, I always get an answer, so it’s a useful tool, too. While I was writing this, someone tweeted about problems setting up Wordpress; within two minutes she had a link to a tutorial.

So I’m a convert, and being the gadget freak that I am, I’ve also found a few Twitter tools (thanks to my new Twitter friend, BigBrightBulb). Here’s a list:

• TweetStats - exactly what it says
• TweetScan - a real time tweet search
• Twitter Tools list

I plan to stick around on Twitter (at least as long as the same quality remains). Feel free to follow me.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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