Honestly – I’m probably the last person on earth to have figured out how to use Twitter. Ok, since I don’t know everybody there’s no guarantee that I’m the last. I’ve had a Twiter account for a year or so and it was not until a couple of days ago I figured out how to use it for business. I’ve tweeted on my half-marathon training, the weather, news and other personal topics, but never on business. So for those that have figured this out, no point continuing on. But for the others read on.

I wanted to get my early thoughts down while they are fresh – so here goes. I was stumped for months on figuring out who to follow, when I had no clue as to who was using Twitter. I managed to find some interesting people and began following them, but it was a stream of conversations that I couldn’t follow and frankly missed most of them as they scrolled by everyday. Over coffee with a local social media expert he put me on to Tweetdeck. So between Tweetdeck and the concept of #hashtags, my Twitter experience improved dramatically.  Honestly!

With Tweetdeck you can view tweets that fall into categories that you define. For example, I’m interested in product management. So I set up a Tweetdeck search on all tweets that contain the #prodmgmt hashtag. Every time a tweet occurs with the #prodmgmt embedded in it, the tweet appears in my #prodmgmt search pane. Employees of companies, especially those involved with the core business have interests in the subject matter of their business as well as the role they play in the company. For example, if you are a product manager with a company that sells to the supply chain management space, you could set up a search pane for product management (#prodmgmt) and one for supply chain management (#scm). If you deliver your software as a service, set up a search pane with #saas as the search keyword, or #agile if you develop software using agile methods … you get the picture. On the subject matter end, if you’re in the DRM space use #drm as your keyword or if you’re in the FOIA space use #foia and so on. The #hashtags site allows you to search for registered tags – make sure that you pick ones that are active (i.e. there are posts at least hourly) for you to get any value.

Good luck! See you on Twitter!