My Twitter Primer
Purpose: Encourage my fellow members of HRASM, and fellow HR professionals, to engage on this social media channel.
Twitter’s basic premise asks the question, “What are you doing?” Twitter’s basic challenge is for you to answer that question in 140 characters or less, never more.
Another way of looking at Twitter is it is the modern era equivalent of the telegram. In the days of telegram, words were counted as five characters, (rule of thumb). The basic telegram pricing was based upon 25 words. 25 words times 5 characters equals 125 characters. On Twitter, spaces and punctuation count. What can you say in 140 characters or less never more?
To join the conversation, go to https://twitter.com/signup . Standard login protocol applies. You will be providing your name, creating a username & password, and your account gets tied to your email account. To keep the spammers out of the pool, a two word verifcation is required. All easy stuff, nothing new or threatening in these days and times.
I use my Twitter primarily professional reasons. As such, my username needs to be readily identifiable to me. My opinion – CB Channel 19 handles are less effective. Be who you are.
Now that you are in, go to the settings tab and work your way left to right to make the changes that will make your account you. Icon picture, background, a few words about yourself. You control the content and presentation.
There is also a very useful and plain spoken Help video & tab available.
Now that you are in, who are you going to follow and how are you going to attract followers.
Who to follow? Here are some reassuring recommendations:
ME! RMSmithJr
Rick Dacri
David Pease
China Gorman of SHRM
To get even more folks to follow, see who these folks are following, and to a lesser extent, who is following them. I manage who I follow and even more actively manage and monitor who follows me. Let’s just say that the mature adult entertainment industry is using Twitter for as a marketing opportunity.
Jump on in and give this social media channel a chance and a shot.
Love it ! How will you keep track of who follows your suggestion – and how they get on with it? As I lead workshops on social networking for business it is always good to hear stories like that!
And HR folks using Social Networking is a newsworthy story in itself.
Jackie Cameron said this on October 19, 2009 at 7:07 am
Those are good questions and have been ruminating on them. One idea that just occurred was a follow-on posts on hash tags utilization. i.e. #HR #Maine #SHRM #MaineHR
Here is another international persona to follow: http://twitter.com/jackiecameron1
RMSJr said this on October 19, 2009 at 8:07 am
Great posting. Let’s try to expand the number of followers within HRASM and within the Maine HR community. It will be a challenge, but let’s begin.
Rick Dacri said this on December 11, 2009 at 4:31 pm