Successful Time Management For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12

Twitter: Time Saver or Time Waster

In This Chapter

• Following your friends, family, and others
• Preventing Twitter from taking over your cell phone … and your life

Twitter has had an explosive impact on how we communicate with others. The number of active monthly users of Twitter is just short of 300 million. Twitter users don't send messages, they send tweets. A tweet is an expression you have in a moment. It can be an idea or thought. You can include text, photos, or videos in your tweets. You are limited to 140 characters so brevity is essential.

There are over 500 million tweets a day shared on Twitter. They are shared in real time so communication is instantaneous. The most famous tweet was the photo of Ellen DeGeneres and friends at the Oscars. It had over 2 million “favorites” and more than 3.5 million retweets. A retweet is when someone shares someone else's tweet with their followers. A favorite is when someone wants to acknowledge your tweet. It would be similar to a “like” on Facebook. Anyone can gain a following on Twitter that enables you to communicate short messages to a larger group of people than just your grandmother. Just as with Facebook's Like button, tweets collect favorites from your followers and people who see the retweet. You can also include hashtags (#) so Twitter can better categorize or assign a topic to your tweet. This allows an ever-widening audience to see your musings.

Deciding Who to Follow

If you decide to use Twitter, you need to ...