Happy Birthday Twitter! On the 21st March Twitter turned five. Who would have imagined that a simple 140 character social media micro blogging site would have such a massive impact. Today over 200 million people have twitter accounts. Social media is changing how people interact, source and gain access to information forever. Google search is so “old school”. Many people believe twitter is a passing fad or boring, but those that do are failing to move beyond the hype of social media and understand the driving social values behind this phenomenon.
There are two groups of people using twitter – those who tell us what they are doing – and those who tell us what they are thinking. It’s the second group, “the thinkers” who you want to connect with and it’s amazing how easy it is to avoid the first group when you demarcate twitter along these lines.
The twitter community of thinkers, in my personal experience, is an incredibly generous community with people freely sharing ideas and valuable thoughts. It has proven invaluable to the team at TomorrowToday as a source of ideas and inspiration.
Think about topics you are passionate about. From photography to customer experience. Perform searches on twitter using the hash tag. One of my favourite topical trends is #custserv
You will quickly identify who the thought leaders are. Follow and list them so that you can easily view their tweets.
Another trick is to follow the people who are following the thought leaders, they themselves are often thought leaders and there’s a better than not chance that they are interested in the same subjects as you are.