Following 1,000 Twitter Accounts, and Working at the Same Time

Today I have followed my 1,000th Twitter account when I clicked to follow @irishmammies. One thousand accounts - that's a lot. I know some people follow a lot more and it must be hard to keep up. I'm sure that just like everybody else on Twitter, I follow friends, colleagues, academics, celebrities, news feeds, education feeds, newspapers, sports organizations, and a lot more. I find it is a great way to keep up with topical discussions, and several times during the day I will check in on Twitter to see what the folks and organizations I am following have to say.

Image source:
Twitter.com.

Some business have often asked "How do you make money with Twitter?" (and Facebook). Quite often the best answer might be to "Turn it off". Twitter is incredibly addictive. Today I read the article "5 Grammar Points You Don’t Have to Care About Anymore" which I would have missed if it not for someone else that I follow having tweeted about it. Should I have been doing something else? Twitter takes a lot of the work out of keeping up-to-date with subject areas that I teach in, but many people might regard using Twitter as a waste of time. 

Me - I intend to be a bit more active on Twitter during the coming academic year, and post tweets about topics that I think my students should know about. I will be recommending accounts to follow at the start of the year and encourage students to tweet and retweet items of interest.

Twitter is also an incredibly powerful tool when you want to complain about something. Putting your complaint in a public domain like Twitter makes companies sit up and take notice much quicker than they might if you make a call to a Support Line and speak to just one person. I've got Eircom to fix my broadband at home in the past, and more recently got free stamps from An Post when I tweeted about their stamp machine not working in Dublin Airport. A tweet can trend so quickly that companies are using Twitter to address things quickly and address customer concerns and complaints.