The Importance of Twitter
Twitter plays a vital communication role in many communities throughout the world. The social media platform is connecting communities of individuals passionate about certain topics, creating a place for coordinating collective action and information sharing with a broad segment of the society. This communication and information sharing is rapid and fluid, but once you understand the mechanics of the platform interaction, you can use Twitter to enhance your work, community and personal life.
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Community Building
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One major role of Twitter for individual users is the ability to build communities that reflect the person's interests, profession, passions or work. Some users build a community through Twitter that reflects all of those desires for connection. Such community building is of particular importance to professionals who may work at home or for artists and creators who do not live in a geographical area that makes community building in person a possibility. By searching Twitter for like-minded individuals, users can surround themselves with people of similar cultural, professional and artistic backgrounds. They can share information with their communities, ask questions relevant to personal and professional growth, and engage with similar people from around the world. Using #hashtags and public replies with the "@username" tag allows people to direct their tweets, or messages, to those communities directly and expand their followers and connect with new friends.
Connecting to News
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Twitter allows information to travel around the world at an almost instantaneous speed. When breaking news happens in one region of the world, people on the other side of the globe can get up-to-date information from those experiencing the event in person. Many journalists use Twitter to broadcast their findings and follow the news on the ground as it happens. For example, when Japan was struck by a devastating earth quake and tsunami in March 2011, people experiencing the event were updating information to inform and connect survivors with necessary resources. As the story unfolded, people on Twitter began to use #japan or #earthquake hashtags to direct their information to the people in Japan needing updates or to share their findings with larger Twitter communities following the news in Japan. Many news shows now use Twitter to get direct feedback from their audience about stories.
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Collective Action
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A more evolutionary and evolving use of Twitter is the ability to coordinate a collective action by a community of Twitter users. Such collective action can be as simple as a meeting or "Tweet-Up" of connected followers at a local coffee shop or during a business conference. On a larger scale, Twitter and similar social media platforms are being utilized to organize and implement large-scale protests or collective actions that are changing the governments and political structures in countries around the world. Twitter is enabling people to form strong relationships through the social platform and then directing these relationships towards face-to-face meetings and collective actions.
Resource Sharing And Gathering
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Twitter connects people with vast amounts of information and research. When a person engages with another follower's tweet or retweet, a version of republishing information, he is using this follower as a filter for the information. If he trusts the person who posted the information, he is more likely to engage with the posted news or research. Twitter also allows someone to categorize the information and build communities and conversations around certain hashtags or keywords. Scientists, doctors and other professionals driven and enhanced by information are able to share specific and valuable research using Twitter. For example, if you are a journalist specializing in economic and social issues of Eastern Europe, you can directly follow economists and professors from that region who are posting potential story leads, relevant research and analysis on the topics you then write about for your publication.
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