Are you on twitter? What are the benefits of Twitter?

Twitter as the best social networking site seems to have amassed a vast fan following on the Internet and it is now a verb “TWEETING”, but still there are thousands of people who are not aware of the advanced technology of twitter and its benefits. So through this hub, I will explain a few benefits of twitter. If you are a member of Facebook or Orkut, you know how you can change your Orkut or Facebook status “What are you doing?” type of messages. Twitter is basically just that but via your twitter account, you can only update your status or message using 140 characters or less but these are enough to speak up on Twitter.

Receiving Updates

In Twitter, you can see anybody’s status and receive an update whenever someone you choose to “Follow on Twitter” updates his/her status including many real-life celebrities from Hollywood and Bollywood. Here twitter is different from Orkut and Facebook.

Following Updates

In twitter, you can follow companies, news channels, tech blogs, world personalities, etc. and be updated about new products, news, controversies, world politics, disasters, latest issues, etc. Plus the most important benefit of twitter is that here you can post your own updates as well.

Getting Aware of New Developments

On a personal level, I follow some companies like Google, Apple, Money Control, Squidoo, Hubpages, and their regular updates keep me aware about what are the latest developments that they are up to, their new products, what is going on in their sandbox.

Meeting Old Friends Via Twitter

Twitter is not just about following others, as just like people on FB have a good group of online friends, you can have a large group of friends who can get united on Twitter. You can chat with them and get to know what they are up to. On a professional level, you can engage on twitter for business networking, freelance work, corporate solutions, HR hiring, etc. and on a personal level, you can engage in dating, meeting old friends and relatives, getting reunited with old classmates, etc.

Treasure Hunt Organized Via Twitter

You can organize a meet up of our twitter buddies in your area where all of you can set out from your homes without knowing the destination and step by step the organizer will send updates to the members about the secret destination (something like a treasure hunt).

Sharing Opinions On Twitter

You can have something called tweethon on twitter where everyone tweets their opinions about any topic and participate in a healthy discussion. You can spend more time on twitter to explore its possibilities completely.

Twitter Helps In Getting Second-To-Second Updates

On a lighter note, in some of the companies where my friends work, they have blocked access to Orkut, Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, etc. but not twitter. Their only means of communication to the outside world is through twitter. Twitter has been useful to everyone who wants to follow live news much before than an incident happens and much faster than any media reports it in its news channel. For example, Twitter was the main medium people depended on for the updates on the old Air France crash, tsunami in Japan, etc. There were hundreds of tweets every minute with news links, blog links, and then lately Flickr links and so on. Even during the Mumbai terror attacks, BBC depended on Twitter updates for the photos and opinions of citizens about the attack. So twitter has been largely useful.

Using Tweetdeck For Twitter

You can have Tweetdeck (a personal browser to remain connected with social media) saved on your PC. Tweetdeck is very productive. If you write on revenue sharing websites or your own sites, then twitter can help you get immediate traffic to your articles and blogs. You can tweet the article as soon as you have put it up to help it reach masses.

Anybody Can Tweet

News agencies will not get such frequently-updated information to post as someone who is in the scene of a crime or tragedy (as in the Mumbai attacks). You must have heard about the guy who took all those pictures just after the 26/11 attacks and loaded it into Flickr. His Flickr post was tweeted and retweeted by thousands all over the world and all the news channels picked it up.

Twitter - A Live Search Engine for Masses

Twitter is kind of a Guru of all the net services like news channels, blogs, photo sites, video sites, personalities, et al. Just search Twitter for tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan and you will still get the most recent links to the accident. Google it and you will get the most clicked links, mostly the news links the day the incident happened, but not the latest, so twitter is kind of a live search engine, which Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN or other search engines cannot even dream about.