First Thoughts

I was always reluctant to make a Twitter account. The whole idea of it seemed silly to me. A friend of mine described it as a bunch of people in a giant white room shouting random thoughts to no one in particular. However, one day I broke and started an account. My experience with Twitter has always been that of a personal one. I follow my friends and some random celebrities I like. My Twitter experience consisted of me tweeting sometimes five times in one day, or 1 time a whole week. We were asked to start an account for my Communications 634 class and follow 40 various twitter accounts that we selected from a list. This gave me a whole new outlook on the social networking experience. I was surprised to see that seven of the people I followed actually followed me back, including @10tv and @ohiorealestate. The class opened me up to the business side that Twitter offers. There are two sides of the business side I enjoy. First, I think that Twitter can be a great professional tool. The more people you know and contacts you have, the more likely you are to be connected to something you enjoy (getting that break). All you have to do is have the right person or company see your profile, enjoy it, and want you on their team. The second way this assignment opened my up to the business side of Twitter was through following a lot of local Columbus Twitter profiles, things such as @TheSBB, @shortnorth, @thelantern. I think following those people allows you to see things that are going on in our community. It is almost like having a constantly updated newspaper that only tells you about things that you care about and are interested in. I will continue to use Twitter, but I think I want to keep a personal twitter account, and a professional Twitter account. The personal one is set to private, while my professional one will be public with the attempt to get my name out to as many people and companies as possible.