Navigating the Twitterverse

Posted by Pamela S. on Monday, August 20th, 2012

Finding people on Twitter isn’t always as easy as you would think. Twitter has over 500 million active users who generate over 340 million tweets daily. Many of the people describing their acti

vities in 140 characters write under a username. An active Twitter account can provide a great deal of information about a person’s life. Whether someone is tweeting about purchasing a Grande Latte at Starbucks, or their plans for the weekend, sometimes that mundane information comes in handy.

Most people who use Twitter are active on other social media. The majority also have a Facebook page. While you may not be able to access a lot of the information on a Facebook page, you can often follow someone on Twitter. For some reason, people seem more willing to share their lives in this format. Twitter provides a name search function, but that doesn’t always work. You can search a real name, but not everyone uses their own name on Twitter.

If you know that someone has a special interest; for example, they are trying to lose weight or keep fit, search those categories. Thousands, no, make that millions of people are blogging about their lives and one way that they promote their blogs is through Twitter.

You can often find a link to a person’s Twitter feed from their Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, or other social networking site.

Tweepz is a Twitter search that allows you to search by name and provides information about the user’s location and when they joined. You can filter results and search quicker than you could on Twitter.

Twitter Directories are also a search tool, however, they search primarily by topic of interest. Mashable.com provides the latest news and developments on social media. Read “Find ‘Em On Twitter: 15 Twitter Directories Compared”

Brian Solis put together this great infographic. Check out his website and read “The State of the Twitterverse 2012”

If you find someone on Twitter, and they are an active user, you are in luck. With some users, you can pretty much track their entire day. Twitter messages list the time that the update was posted. You can often see who they follow or who follows them.

If you are on Twitter, you need to realize that you are giving away some important information, even if it doesn’t seem that earth shattering. Do you really want people to know where you are and what you are doing?

Twitter is a valuable tool for promoting a product or service. It is a fun and easy way to keep in touch with your friends. It is also a portal to areas of your life that you don’t want strangers, hackers and criminals to access, and that includes the government. Read Twitter’s Transparency report. The first Twitter Transparency Report includes data from January 1, 2012 through June 30, 2012. In this first report, Twitter reported that the United States government filed 679 requests for user data in the first half of the year. The U.S. was at the top of the list for government requests. Twitter will be updating the report twice a year.

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